


Last Rest

by bandaran



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alive Hale Family, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Anxiety, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Dead Scott McCall, Dysfunctional Family, Fox Lore, Fox Stiles, Hale Family Feels, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Mental Anguish, Mutual Pining, Original Pack, Physical Abuse, Scent Marking, Scenting, Sexual Content, Sharing Body Heat, Sheriff Stilinski's Name is John, bed sharing, wolf lore
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-13
Updated: 2019-03-19
Packaged: 2019-04-22 09:16:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 27
Words: 63,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14305542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bandaran/pseuds/bandaran
Summary: Born in the year of the Fox, Stiles is an outcast in Last Rest, the last town on the edge of the known world. During the holy time of the offering he contends with not only townsfolk that despise him and a curious new family of outsiders, but with the mangled fox spirit lurking at the edges of his vision.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> You can find fanart/garbage/updates on ye olde [tumblr ](http://bandaran.tumblr.com/) and [twitter ](https://twitter.com/bandaranART/)

 

Those that went beyond the Wall were punished, left in the Wood beyond it to rot. Sometimes, if a person was caught trying to climb over, they were hung on the other side by their ankles overnight. When they were pulled back up, if they were alive, they were indentured to the Mayor. Most of the time when the rope was hauled over, it was frayed and bloodstained and not even a corpse was left dangling from it.

Folk native to Last Rest or to the sliver of long-reaching land following the Wall’s course, were never caught tempting it. It was the travelers, thrill-seekers from the cities near the sea, farthest from the barrier. They thought the villagers funny, screwy, superstitious with their lamb’s blood smeared doors and hanging bone talismans and smoking bay laurels. Stiles overheard one woman, drooping from drink, insist that it was all a ruse and the entire town was behind it to sell trinkets and fill beds at the Inn. She said the Wall probably didn’t even stretch the entirety of the land and likely stopped somewhere in the woods beyond Last Rest’s borders.

Stiles wagered her four pennies she couldn’t find the end of it if she went looking and she took him up on it. She had returned to him as he scrubbed the floors, knuckles and wrists stained red with effort, and told him she wouldn’t pay it. Just because she hadn’t found the end of the Wall, didn’t mean there wasn’t one and he must have known it was farther away than any reasonable person would walk. She spat on him and stormed out of the tavern.

Sometimes travelers would ask why, if the people here believed so wholeheartedly that there was a great evil beyond the Wall, did they live so close to it at all? And Stiles’s father would always tell them that this is where he was born and this was where he would die, there’s fear between those two things no matter where you are and they would snicker when his back was turned.

The village was closed to outsiders, its great stone doors drawn shut, during the winter holidays. There were never many people to turn away in the colder seasons anyhow due to the mountain pass building up with snow. In October, on the last day of the year, Stiles would help his father snuff out the old fires and cleanse the house for winter. This had become his favorite day of the year, though he’d _hated_ it as a child. The tavern was closed, the harvests brought in, no more sticky, spilled ale to scrub or beds to turn over or wheat to thresh. When they cleaned their home for the New Year he could take pride in what he did, could rest in a chair and breathe in the scent of freshly bundled pine boughs on the mantle and revel in the spotlessness of a well-kept kitchen and buffed window panes.

And when the cleaning was done he and his father would bundle up in thick scarves and wool long coats and go to the town square for a feast and lighting of the First Flame of the New Year. At the feast’s end, they would take some coals from the bonfire and bring them home to relight the hearths and talk about old times.

John liked to reminisce more and more as he got older. The cleansing of the house belonged to Stiles, but sitting by the new fire, he suspected, was where his father made peace with the passing of the year.

 

All able people were required to work shifts each month to bring offerings to the Wall. After the New Year, offerings were abundant and had to be with the approaching winter. Snow laid crisp on the ground already, cunning west winds making banners snap and twist, threatening to come loose from their keeps. Stiles gutted a pig with the butcher’s son in the early morning, he sleeves rolled up despite the bitter chill in the air. Blood spattered his apron and drenched his hands as he yanked out handfuls of organs. The heart would be mounted on the cornucopia of offerings, and the eyeballs and tongue and liver, the rest would be discarded, burned and buried.

There would be other things too, cheeses and caskets of beer, garlands of pine and holly, and cloth. No one ever volunteered to butcher the pigs with Daniel, they all cringed when the Headwoman called their names and eventually, Stiles started offering himself to the task on their behalf. They didn’t understand the point of the Giving and many of them no longer had the excuse of being too young. The offerings were a penance for safety, they should make a person cringe, toss their stomach, make them feel small and scared.

He used to get dizzy at the sight of blood and after five years of volunteering and running behind the woodshed to vomit, he was here, drenched in the dead pig’s still-warm blood and composed. He’d forced himself to learn from the Wall when the others wanted to help Elsie bake loaves of bread and nut cakes, rather than haul lumber and tar for the cornucopia.

“Slow down,” barked Danny, but his face was kind as he took a swig from his waterskin. Stiles felt his mouth thin, as it did whenever there was something polite he should have said. “Father’ll put me out if he sees how fast you can clean a pig.”

Stiles felt around the cavity, ran his fingers over the slick ribs. In the stark late autumn air, his skin and the pig’s was bluish and veined and dry. But not Danny’s, his family reduced balms for dry skin from the leftover fat of their livestock. He was young and dashing, even spattered in the swine’s blood, maybe more so because of it, as if he had fought a great battle and returned home with spoils like in the songs.

“You going to the church after?” Danny asked. If there was a person Stiles had to be friendly with, it was Daniel. He was kind, truly kind and patient. But Stiles didn’t care much for friends.

Stiles nodded in answer. With this new Offering, Last Rest would usher in the three-year reign of the Fox, ending the previous cycle of the Doe. The changing of the reigns this year would be somber and it showed on passing faces already. In the twelve-year cycle, the years of the Fox were the unluckiest. Fox was a beast of tricks and false promises. Harvests were never as vibrant as they were in the years of the Rabbit or Doe and the hunt was fouler than in the years of the Wolf. The mood of the village was dour as the time to haul to the cornucopia over the Wall drew nearer.

Some shut themselves up in their homes rather than attend service in the chapel during the time of the Fox and the Reverend did not punish them for it; he even refused to baptize children born under the Fox’s sign until they reached an age of four or five to be certain they were not changeling kits.

“Mother insists on it,” Danny sighed, cleaving hooves from the animal on his work table, “We’re the least safe she says, especially the little ones.” It was no secret that Danny’s mother had borne her husband six sons all in one time of the Rabbit or the next. She was a favorite of the Reverend and the new sheriff and all those people that mattered in Last Rest, a truly shining example of the Rabbit’s fertility and quickness, something all women should aspire to.

“I’d like to be married and out of that house,” Danny said, “I don’t mind working Father’s trade, but I can’t stand to hear another holy tirade. She’ll be at it the next three years. Every dinner, I swear it, will be ‘O Lord, make safe our burrow, protect our young’ and so on until I drown myself in God-damn Hava’s Pond. Fuck my ass, speak of the Devil and he shall appear, Mother!” he chirruped the last like a good, God-fearing boy. 

Stiles didn’t turn but he could feel her approach, feel it in the tingling of his spine. She came between the two tables, skirts lifted in her hands to keep the hem from dragging in the crimson-muddy pools that had formed on the ground.

“Daniel,” she said sweetly, patting his cheek. She had hanging from her arm a woven basket filled with the last flowers of the season, marigolds and cabbage roses. “We will be hosting the mayor and his wife and some of their friends for dinner, go home and wash up. You won’t have time to change between then and the service.”

“There’s still a lot to do,” Danny told her, gesturing to the pigs still waiting to be split. Stiles kept his eyes on his task, knowing better than to watch the two of them. Mrs. Māhealani had had him whipped as a boy for dropping eaves and mouthing off to her when he had been caught.

“John’s boy won’t mind finishing up here. Now run on home.”

Danny shot him a mortified, apologetic look when it became clear his mother wouldn’t ask Stiles if he was busy or pay him any mind at all. Stiles gave him a minute shake of the head; it was a battle not worth fighting and one that Mrs. Māhealani would undoubtedly find a way to win. Danny packed up his knives, kissed his mother’s cheek and dashed off into the throng of bodies toiling away in their preparations.

“You’ll not cause mischief here, I trust,” Mrs. Māhealani said, without turning to face him. It wouldn’t do for a woman like her to be seen speaking to him directly.

Stiles licked his lips and said as neutrally as he could, “No Ma’am.”

“Good. If you finish your work and make yourself presentable for church, I’ll have a rack of lamb sent to your father.”

“Thank you, Ma’am,” he muttered and she continued on her way, brightening when she spotted a friend in the crowd and calling out jovially to them. He kept working, more aggressively than before and chewing on the inside of his cheek until it bled. The pig landed with an undignified thwack onto the pile of halved corpses already piled on the shallow wagon beside the table and Stiles swiped his arm across his brow.

Above him, the sky was cloudless, a bottomless vast blue and the sun beat harshly against his eyes. As he moved to Danny’s unfinished sow, his spine began to shiver again. It might have been the cold at first, his arms were already goose-pimpled where he’d sloppily pushed his sleeves past his elbows, but when it lingered, Stiles stopped what he was doing and touched his fingers to his nape.

He turned sharply and there were eyes in the crowd, watching calculatedly; eyes belonging to a man he did not know. He stared back if only because he knew everyone in the village and they knew him and there should not have been unfamiliar faces here, not now after the barring of the village gates.

The man stood with a few others, all of them alien to Stiles. He muttered something to another in his party and suddenly there were two sets of eyes watching through the crowd; sky-colored eyes. For a moment Stiles thought he was seeing visions no one else could because no one else seemed bothered enough by this intrusion to scowl at them until the Mayor appeared in his fine dark coat and took the weighty looks off of Stiles.

Stiles never stopped observing, though his hands went back to work, gently tugging and snipping and tossing away useless parts of the hog. The Mayor looked to be showing them the cornucopia, introducing them to Robert Martin’s team of builders and laughing heartily and Stiles was disgusted by it. There was a reason outsiders weren’t allowed during this time. They knew nothing of the Wall, of the importance of appeasing what lay beyond it. The Wall took away from those that disobeyed it; took away more than most knew they could lose.

 

Stiles ran home to scour the blood from his skin and bring his father supper. John was propped up reading in his bed, the candlelight having sunken into a puddle of sugary-smelling beeswax. Stiles laid the tray of stew he had left to simmer by the hearth that morning. Some of the carrots had gone mushy since he had had to drop them into the broth early knowing he wouldn’t have time to check back on it later in the day.

“This damn thing expects me to believe there’s cities on the coast all wired up with bulbs burning light all on their own. Mrs. Tover’s a gullible old fool if she thinks a lick of this is true.”

“Mayor Hubbard has electric lights,” Stiles pointed out, fluffing the pillow under John’s splinted leg.

“That’s _one_ house,” his father snapped, throwing down the book. There weren’t many in town, and Stiles folded it neatly closed and placed in on the nightstand for that reason. It was the rare peddler that would bother to hike the narrow mountain trail loaded down with books to trade in Last Rest. Most of the farmers on the outskirts of the town couldn’t read beyond receipts of payment or debt anyhow. His father and their neighbors all swapped the few books they had, especially now that John was forced to bedrest until his leg mended.

“Where are you off to in your best shirt?” John asked skeptically.

“I’m getting a pint with Danny,” Stiles lied without pause.

“They serve pints in the chapel now?”

“After he’s done with the service.”

John caught his elbow, stopping him from fussing over the blankets. His hands were shaking without something to keep them busy.

“You don’t have to go just ‘cause they expect you to.”

“I’m going to get a drink,” Stiles said, keeping his voice firm.

“You been shaking like a leaf since this morning. Did you drink any of that tea the doctor gave you?”

“I had some, I have to go.”

John sighed and nodded and told him to be safe on the road at night.

 

 

Stiles watched them haul the vast offering slab, one as long as a tall man and twice as wide over the Wall. It was a splendid feast in the torchlight; the golden light bathing over the arrangement and flowers and garlands and the rich scent of incense wafting up from the burners mounted all along the rim. It grew shadowed by the time it reached the top until vanishing from sight.

The crowd mumble prayers, their hands clasped together under their whispers, but Stiles wouldn’t join them in this. Prayers were no better than screaming into a deep, dark chasm. The Reverend had told him when he was little that there was always someone to listen to prayers, be it God or angels or the Four. Crouched over his straw-stuffed mattress, his knees aching on the cold floor, he’d never felt surrounded by anything other than the walls of his bedroom.

His work butchering the hogs was his sacrifice to the Wall. The Wall didn’t ask for prayers, it asked for meat.

And as this thought, or farewell to part of the harvest, crossed his mind a horrible _snap_ cracked in the chill night air and then a thud shook the ground. Blood drained from his chest at the sound, his eyes darting for the source of it. A woman cried out and when they came to understand as she did, more wails joined the first. One of the offering’s ropes had broken under the weight of it and all of it had come sliding down half over the village side of the wall, half over the Wood’s side. One of the pig halves grotesquely straddled the barrier, its eye-less face grinning back at them.

Several people threw themselves at the ground, sobbing, trying to gather up what was not completely smashed or soiled and others rushed to help the Wall Men right the swinging offering slab. Before they could rig the pullies to drag it back up the ropes began tearing, one after another until the slab was gone out of sight, having landed fully on the wrong side of the Wall.

Fear paralyzed Stiles and stole all of his breath and made his head whorl. He couldn’t snatch his eyes away from the pig on the wall, from its cruel smirk. He had done everything right, he’d cared for his father when his horse threw him, made dinners, brought whatever food was spare to the McCalls, gone to church every Sunday and precisely cleaned every slaughtered animal Mr. Māhealani had given him that day including the one mocking him now. He’d done as the Wall asked and yet – no, this was not the Wall’s doing.

It was Fox’s.

He lived subserviently to the village, to the Wall, but not to the Fox. The pig wasn’t smiling like a pig, it was Fox, grinning at him, reveling in his punishment, or that punishment that would soon be his. Before he could run away, run home, force himself get away from the others, a woman was upon him, her face tear-streaked and hands caked in dirt. Her palm cracked against his cheek hard enough to put him on the ground, and a sound came out of him, an _animal_ sound of fear that made her eyes bulge with repulsion and she hit him again and again until his nose leaked a trail of blood.

“Please,” he begged her, his fear untying a tongue he’d obediently learned to keep in check, “Please, it’s not my fault,” he sobbed, but she was looking through him, he wasn’t real to her, just some _thing_ , some curse delivered on the village. Fox was turning out lies from him even now, trying to protect its foothold in him. It made him sputter nonsense pleas of his innocence when they weren’t true.

“Have we not allowed you to _live?_ ” she screeched, snot running from her nose and tears making her eyes glossy in the low light, “Given you _work_? Given you to _God_ for His blessing? And yet you _curse_ us, _you ruin us_!”

People gathered around them but did nothing to stop her and briefly, Stiles saw Melissa McCall among them looking ashamed. He reached out to her, begged her for help, but she just watched him pityingly. She never wanted to believe he was evil when he was younger. He had overheard her put John and Claudia at ease, hiding on the stairs in his night clothes; she told them a child could never be corrupted, that he was a beautiful little boy, had such pretty eyes that would drive girls into a state when he was older.

That was a long time ago and the years since had polluted him in her mind and he stopped trying to cover his face with his arms when he saw that expression betrayed in her face.

“You are a _demon_!” cried the woman, breathing hard and finally collapsing backward to weep into her hands. He might have been crying as well, but he couldn’t tell from the red wetness making most of his battered face slick. Through the pounding in his skull, the core of his pain was not physical because no one could beat him harder than the Fox could. It had sprung up from the ground somewhere in that wretched Wood, beyond the Wall he tried so hard to appease and had bounded into Last Rest already waging a war of mischief.

Reverend Whittemore materialized from the angry whispers and tears of the mob. He looked down on Stiles’s bloodied face, his eye now swollen half closed, and a muscle in the Reverend’s cheek bounced. Anyone else thinking of raising a hand against him wouldn’t dare do so in the Reverend’s presence.

“Can you stand?” he asked coldly, his voice frozen as the ground.

Stiles nodded immediately without much thought to whether or not he could. Trembling and half-blinded, he got to his feet. His shirt was pinkish and muddied, its collar torn. If only he could sink into the soil and disappear. Every thread of him pulled tight to his body, avoiding the angry faces on all sides.

“Go to confession,” the Reverend ordered and again, a conditioned nodded bobbled his head and he hobbled away from them, holding down the want to sob.

He flung himself down into the first pew. The church was warmed and decorated for the service. Dominating the space, just below the solemn gaze of the Lamb and His cross, was a massive, roaring fireplace, one housing most of the New Year’s bonfire. It made his cuts sting with its billows of heat. He waited for the Reverend to fetch him, to bring him into the confessional for purging for a long time. The crackling, dancing flames, made him heavy, melted the snow in his hair and on his coat and he thought of the last time he had come to confess his sins.

Fox hadn’t allowed it, even during slumber, the creature had twisted his reality, made his thoughts strange even if he thought they were pure at the time. And it had contaminated the Reverend with its blight as well. Even though he was married, had sons, was a pious man of the Lord, he’d bent Stiles over his desk, fucked him like an animal would and he’d – he had wanted it more than anything.

No matter how much he had tried to think of Mrs. Whittemore, of the sins of adultery; Fox had taken over his senses and made him stupid. He remembered Whittemore’s heavy, rough hands on his hips, the ragged sound of his breathing and himself, mewling pushing back into the heat and pressure and pleasurable burn of it. And he remembered being hollowed out by what he had done, lying on his bed at home, alone and feeling nothing. No remorse and no warmth or affections.

And they never spoke of it again.

 The empty feeling had him now and, exhausted, he dozed off in the pew, chin slumping to his chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp, that was depressing Bandy. 
> 
> Yes, I agree Other Bandy. 
> 
> That Fox is a real butt. And so is the rest of the town? They're all kind of butts. My Melissa-McCall-Hate spidey senses are tingling. Before anyone's panties bunch up, just wait. Wait my precious-es. 
> 
> Man, I'm shit at writing summaries. Like, either I get lazy and pull passages from the fic or write a 90s style blurb on the back of the VHS box. So, it'll prolly change. Or not? idk. Ignore me. 
> 
> And the Major Character death thing, I mean, spoiler I guess, but Scott's not in this mother because I'm bored with his character. So he's dead. That's the character death. no fear my babies. 
> 
> Hey thanks for reading chum. I hope your day is coolbeans. Lemme know whatcha thought :DD


	2. Chapter 2

“Why has no one seen to this boy’s injuries?!” cried a feminine voice. His cheek was being patted gently by a gloved hand and when his eyes cracked open the face of an angel knelt before him. She was raven-haired with wideset dark eyes and skin fair as snow.

“Please, Miss Hale,” came the Mayor’s voice nervously, “it’s better you don’t touch – him.”

The word that nearly fell from his lips was _it_ , rather than _him,_ and Stiles felt it distantly as if it were another of slaps from the woman in the square. Stiles’s gaze rolled around the room, at all of the people gathered there and most of them were strange to him: three women, two of them younger and one that was clearly their mother, each dressed in fur-lined brocade and overcoats worth more than Stiles’s father’s house and two men, both sharp-faced and handsome. The five of them were of an unearthly quality, like porcelain dolls and their smell – Stiles’s eyes drifted closed when he pulled in a nose-full of them. Lemons and mint and rosemary, like spring after rain.

The girl and she was that he realized, kneeling by him rolled her eyes and asked him, “Are you in much pain? Are you able to speak?”

“Who?” he asked in a daze, his mind flitting about from thought to thought and back.

“I am Miss Cora Hale,” she said, her voice clear as a silver bell and firm, “Why did that woman attack you?”

“Miss Hale, as I said outside, it is truly not necessary we intercede,” spouted off Mayor Hubbard, “Reverend Whittemore has things in hand, I assure you.” His ruddy face had broken out in an ungainly perspiration which he dabbed gingerly at was a silk handkerchief.

“I am curious what exactly that ugliness was all about,” said the elder of the two men, though he did not seem appalled as his words implied, rather morbidly intrigued by the violence, a student observing surgery in an operating theatre. His icy blue eyes twinkled with gold vestiges from the hearth.

The Reverend cleared his throat, a sign that he was choosing his words carefully, and Stiles’s floaty mind wondered why he and the Mayor were going to such lengths to make a good impression on these outsiders.

“Stiles is a special child,” he said and a tremble picked up Stiles’s spine, for he had never heard himself described so agreeably by anyone other than his father.

“So special that a woman nearly _bludgeoned_ him to death?” balked Cora and the other young woman, presumably her sister they were so similar in looks, said her name crossly and with a slight warning. From her expression, Cora had heard her name said this way many times before and dismissed it as soon as the tone met her ears.

The Reverend’s lips thinned into a humorless smile and he said, “He was born under the sign of the Fox. It is discouraged that a woman become pregnant before or during that time; I’m certain such customs are not unknown to you, Miss Hale.”

“Yes,” said the older man slyly, “Even so, I don’t believe this boy had anything to do with your ceremony being foiled. I saw him earlier today making quick work of the very hogs mounted on your offering slab.”

“Yes well, you see,” stammered the Mayor.

He was interrupted by a voice like velvet as the older woman spoke. Her voice was low and reserved and demanded Stiles’s attention whether or not he cared to give it. She said, “They believe this boy’s association with the Fox is what brought mayhem to their ceremony.” Her tawny, almond shaped eyes went to Stiles, “Is that right young man?”

But Stiles had no answer for her that would not deliver more pain to himself so he said nothing, his face stony. She nodded shallowly and continued, “So it is true. This concerns me greatly Mayor Hubbard.”

And the Mayor’s eyes burned into Stiles no matter how hard he tried to hide it.

“What is to be done with him?” asked Cora’s sister. She was stately as her mother; well-contained and stern.

Neither the Reverend, nor the Mayor answered her immediately, rather they traded glances of uncertainty. Finally, Whittemore spoke slowly, holding a pregnant stare with Mayor Hubbard, “We will need to consider that carefully. There have been other incidences, Miss Hale, and this happening will not rest easily with the people. For Stiles’s own safety, it is better he does not leave the chapel.”

“What other incidences?” asked the smirking man and Stiles was nervous at his intrigue and the lilt of his mouth.

“It’s really not necessary to delve into the gritty details-,” sputtered the Mayor.

“Mr. Hale asked you a question,” came a commanding voice, one that was more feral even than Cora’s. He was odd looking compared to the others, though clearly related to them. His features were extremes of the others, bright eyes like the smirking man set just a hair too far from each other and high cheekbones over a strong jaw. They all wore shades of black, embellished in some way that made the clothes fine, except him. Were his coat, trousers, and vest not so well garnered nor his boots polished to a glinting shine, he’d not look as well-bred as he did. He did not look at Stiles, not once, and Stiles was glad of it. He’d have buckled under the weight of a stare from a man like him. Mayor Hubbard seemed to be floundering under it.

“His mother and a boy living near him both met untimely ends,” Whittemore swept in, sparing Hubbard any further embarrassment for the moment, “Recently his father was thrown from a horse and crippled. And there have been other incidents, spoiled grain stores that he had a hand in threshing, that sort of thing.”

“It sounds as though each time someone stubs a toe in this town it is this boy’s doing,” mused Mr. Hale.

“Are you questioning the existence of the Fox?” the Reverend shot back expectantly.

“Of course, he is not,” answered Mrs. Hale, though Mr. Hale looked unrepentant for his sharp tongue. Her attention fell to Stiles and it was difficult not to fidget with his heart throbbing so painfully and his breath coming short. “May I have your name, child?” He licked his lips, stunned by her politeness.

“Um,” he croaked, the split in his bottom lip burning, “I’m, I’m,” but there was no breath for making words. He blinked hard, scrubbing his face and was instantly racked with a shock of pain that made him shudder.

Cora’s fingers encircled his wrist and she said, “Don’t speak, try to breathe.”

“His name is Mieczyslaw Stilinski,” the Mayor said for him and then more quietly and poisonous as a drop of lye, he added, “Most call him Mischief for obvious reasons.” Stiles was aware of the moniker, but what Mayor Hubbard did not say was that none used any name when addressing him if they did at all. A person with no name wasn’t a person.

“I believe indenturing those that violate the Wall is a common punishment here,” Mrs. Hale said calmly, “The safest place for Mr. Stilinski would then be working in the Mayor’s House until a different arrangement can be reached, don’t you think?” While Mr. Hale was clever and seemed to tout that fact, Mrs. Hale was more tactful in her ways. She ended her proposal with a private sort of smile that made it clear, to Stiles at least, that she and Mr. Hale were not married, they were blood-related.

The Reverend and the Mayor spoke of Stiles’s wellbeing as if it was something they both valued, something to protect. But as soon as the Hales’ eyes were averted he would be thrown in a stockade and at the mercy of a town that feared and blamed and hated him. He resisted the urge to throw himself at their feet, to kiss Mrs. Hale’s fingers, to beg their compassion and that they take him away with them back to wherever they had come from.

He took shivering breaths and stared pleadingly at Cora as a few more words were swapped between the others. She regarded him keenly and maybe, for a moment, she understood him completely, knew he could say nothing in the presence of these two men or ever. Fox mangled his tongue, made him say and do things that were unspeakable, made him enjoy doing it. He didn’t want to bring misfortune on her or her family, he only wanted her help even if he did not know in what form he needed it.

She gave his wrist a light squeeze and she looked, not to her older sister or her mother or Mr. Hale, but to her brother, the coldest of them. They shared thoughts without speaking the way Stiles had once shared thoughts with Scott McCall, the two of them crouching under the table in his father’s house, listening to their parents talk. The young man leaned toward Mr. Hale then and whispered something.

“Mayor Hubbard,” Mr. Hale said grandly, “I think we can all agree that Mr. Stilinski should be cleaned up and fed and I, personally, am famished. I have been hearing about your cook’s roast duck all day and wouldn’t mind a glass of wine as well.”

Hubbard paused, hands resting atop his round belly, “Well, yes, yes of course. Reverend Whittemore will see to it young Mr. Stilinski is discreetly moved to the servants’ quarters.”

“Derek and I can assist the Reverend,” Cora said quickly, “If that is alright with you, Mother.”

Mrs. Hale nodded, “Yes, I think that would be best,” she said, intelligent eyes taking in the measure of the Mayor and Stiles wanted to sob.

“There is no need, I assure you,” stuttered Mayor Hubbard.

“ _Frankly_ ,” Mrs. Hale said metallically, “I do not trust that that boy will make it to your servants’ quarters unharmed, furthermore it is better Reverend Whittemore get on with his service. Your people have suffered a shock, they need guidance from their church and my children are well suited to care for Mr. Stilinski, _Mr_. Hubbard.”

“I think that is a wise plan, Mayor Hubbard,” Whittemore put in, though whether or not he believed it was dubious, “If the square is cleared, the likelihood of another altercation will be lessened.”

“Yes, I suppose,” Hubbard grudgingly agreed. This wasn’t about Stiles, not really. It was about the presentation of the town. The Mayor was catching up to Whittemore’s line of thinking, though more slowly and it was painfully obvious.

Mr. Hale tacked on smugly, “Also I am certain Mrs. Hubbard is not the sort of woman to be kept waiting.” He checked his timepiece and it seemed more a dramatic gesture than him genuinely consulting the time, “We appear to be several minutes overdue for dinner as it stands.” These people condemned Stiles, called him ungodly, and yet one of the leaders of their town would not be attending the Service. He would be stuffing his belly with feast in the privacy of his home, gorging on those parts of the harvest that had not made it to the cornucopia.

“Of course, of course,” the Mayor said, “and you’re right, Marjorie will have worked up a head of steam by now.” His white-gloved hand swept toward the doors and Mr. Hale nodded graciously. Mrs. Hale took his arm, having extracted an elegant hand from her sable muff and they glided from the pulpit with the Mayor waddling after them.

Cora helped Stiles to stand and leaned him against her brother.

“Mr. Stilinski knows the way to the side door,” Whittemore said swiftly, no longer putting on airs in the absence of Mrs. Hale.

Stiles sagged heavily into Cora’s brother, despite his fearsome appearance. His knees wobbled with every step and his eyes watered when a wintery air blew past them. The Hales did not speak while they waited in the graveyard at the side of the church for the Reverend’s service to begin nor did they once the square was clear. Stiles pointed them to a back road that passed the Mayoral Manor, one that would stray away from the main street in case of stragglers.

They made it passed the tannery just before Stiles collapsed. He braced to hit the hard-packed snowy ground, his mind spinning away out of reach, but rather than meeting it and strong arm kept him upright, and that sweet, herbal scent rushed back in despite his blind, drained state, comforting and gentle as his mother’s piano trickling its forlorn notes.

“This town is disgusting,” came Cora’s voice as he was hoisted up into her brother’s arms. Neither of them sounded worried that he might die and it calmed him in a strange way even if he was there and not there with them as if he were dreaming. “All of the Wall towns are. Mother’s a fool for coming here.”

“Mother’s not a fool,” rumbled in the chest pressed to Stiles’s ear, dark and slow as sap.

“These people don’t know what it is they’re afraid of and so they are afraid of everything, they blame everything.”

Cora said nothing more until they arrived. Her brother laid Stiles on a cot by the fire while she began barking orders at the servants, demanding willow bark and hot water and bandages and Stiles realized he had been so afraid like Cora had said. Afraid they would be seen on the road, that the Reverend would turn on them, that the Fox would lash out at them somehow and he had forced himself to stay awake until now. Soon Cora’s voice faded, and the spitting fire faded and the feeling of a hand, wide and dry and warm and smelling of spring, smoothing over his forehead, faded too.

 

 

Stiles was shaken awake by hands not nearly as caring as those that had laid him down to sleep. The room was darkened, the modest brick fireplace having gone down to smolders. He knew, after a few seconds of shock, that he had been brought to Mayor Hubbard’s house, that this was supposed to be where the servants went about day to day chores out of sight. By his cot was a table, worn from years of use, neatly piled with sewing baskets for mending and a couple of chairs.

He had not known much about the mayor, only that he was wealthy and he must have been much richer than Stiles had been told to keep a separate sewing room for his domestic help. Through the door just beyond where he lay there was laid out a hall of doors; dormitories perhaps, for the maids and valets. His curiosity was snuffed out as soon as his faculties returned to find that Reverend Whittemore was that one to have woken him.

He scrambled back on his cot with a yelp and Whittemore gave him a swift smack to discourage any more sounds. The strike was not as hard as he knew the Reverend capable, not even as hard as the woman in the square, but his face was so bruised already that it brought wells of tears to sting in his eyes.

“I will not tell you this again,” whispered the Reverend, “so you would do well to listen closely.”

Should Stiles scream? How had Whittemore come to be here? Who had let him in? In the shadows and pale moonlight, the Reverend’s face was awful, a mask of hard, unfeeling bone.

“You do not speak to the Hales,” Whittemore said, “even if they ask you a direct question, nor do you speak to Mayor Hubbard in their presence. You will do your chores and go to sleep as if your tongue has been cut out.”

Overcome with shivering, Stiles tried to nod.

“If I hear that you have spoken out of turn, I will personally see to it that you are flogged in the town square and if you so much as think of the night you bewitched me with the Devil’s tricks I will have you burned for a witch.”

“David-,” blurted Stiles and Whittemore jerked toward him, hand raised to strike him again, but did not. Instead, the open palm turned into a pointing finger wreathed by white knuckles held inches from Stiles’s nose.

“Never call me by my Christian name again, _Fox slut._ ”

Whittemore’s other hand gripped Stiles upper thigh hard enough to turn the skin under it purplish. A dark shadow crossed over the Reverend’s face, his eyes hooded as they left Stiles’s face and followed the hard rise and fall of Stiles’s chest, tracing his ripped collar and the sweat beading his clavicle.

Whittmore’s voice softened when he said, “You’ll behave, won’t you?”

And Stiles nodded jerkily, teeth gritted and a humiliated blush breaking out over the tops of his cheeks.

“I don’t enjoy punishing you, child,” breathed Whittemore. His hand slid higher until it rested atop Stiles’s belly, his fingers edging beneath the filthy hem of his shirt. The Fox, it was in the room, skulking in the darkness, prickling Stiles’s skin with its low, amused growl and Stiles had to tell Whittemore, warn him of the spirit’s chaos. It was infecting him, making him do things he did not mean. It bared its fangs beside Stiles ear, rumbling, ready to slash Whittemore’s throat, to bathe Stiles in his blood and push them both into a lonely grave and Hellfire.

“Rev-,” Stiles tried, but the door flew open, clattering against the wall starkly. The sudden sound snapped Whittemore from Fox’s trance and he was standing fluidly, his greedy hand’s absence leaving behind a cold spot on Stiles stomach. Could he have willed the distraction? Maybe he was a witch, an instrument of dark forces because he had wanted nothing more than to get away from the Reverend, to spare them both of his curse.

But it was not magic that had scared off the beast. At first, Stiles cowered away from the dark figure in the doorway, certain it was a wraith come to spirit them both into the Pit, or worse, beyond the Wall. The broad shoulders and long legs ensconced in shadow took a step into the room, light eyes burning for the briefest of moments as a moon played tricks with Stiles’s sight.

Derek Hale’s suffocating presence filled up the space, pushing all of the air from the small room. Stiles tried to prop himself up, to look less pathetic than he felt. He was a man, not a rodent, no matter how often the Fox hounded him, chasing him to and fro like a hare. Derek’s gaze slid over him after boring into the Reverend. In his eyes, there was no pity for what Stiles was, only fury. Fury at what, Stiles didn’t know, but it was frightening to behold.

“Mr. Hale,” Whittemore said, not pleasantly, but something close to it.

“ _Get out_ ,” Derek said, leaving no space for argument, his eyes clapping back on to the Reverend in such a way, with such hostility, Stiles’s toes curled.

“I didn’t mean to intrude,” the Reverend told him, politely dismissing Derek’s rudeness. Whittemore bowed his head respectfully and was gone from the room, his long black robes fluttering as they passed over the threshold.

Derek did not turn to watch him leave, though his eyes tracked his movement from their corners. Each footfall over the oaken floor was clanging hammer in Stiles’s ears and he had to close his eyes until they were gone. Silence fell back over the house, a muffling, peaceful cloth descending over a table. When he opened them again Derek was staring at him and his heart kicked up, flitting like a fledgling’s wings. It was too intimate a look and Stiles swallowed on a paper-dry throat.

There might have been something Mr. Hale meant to say to him. His words were thoughts, there, but unable to breach his lips. Cora might have understood, as she had understood Stiles’s own quiet pleading, but there was nothing Stiles could make out of it.

How must he have looked to Derek Hale? A wretch, ugly and broken, huddled on a spare cot reeking of old attic space. Stiles wanted to tell him it wasn’t true, he wasn’t so weak, he wasn’t the Fox even if it owned him, they weren’t the same. But he was forbidden to speak. Words were his plague; each one a diseased rat scuttling from his mouth to spread their sickness. They swarmed his mind, clawing to be free and he shoved them down, back into the unholy place from which they were sprung.

Derek left the sewing room then, receding into the night-fallen hall, the door swinging gently shut behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok. Listen. OK. I'm sorry. It's gonna be sad frikn times at Stiles High for awhile. 
> 
> Man. I AM AMPED. So much writing my babies. For once I'm not an emo fucking mess going to post. I think I've hit a good working stride lately despite the absolute hell that was my renting situation. BUT regular posting is not quite on the horizon. Between unpacking the new house and my other personal projects (the ones for money :|) I can't swing weekly updates yet. I know. Lame. 
> 
> So, for anyone who does not give a flying frik about the source material, I thought I'd mention that David's not an OC. Well. He is and he isn't. David is the canonical name of Jackson's dad (I googled it, because I, personally, have no fucks to give, flying or otherwise, about TW), but he was as one dimensional as they come so I filled in some details and what not. He is not a nice person as I'm sure you've noticed. 
> 
> Welp, that's all I've got I think. If you have questions or feedback go for it. I read them ALL and respond when I can!
> 
> And now I must fold laundry. Le sigh.


	3. Chapter 3

In the morning, just before dawn, Stiles was given a spare shirt and smock and brought to the Housekeeper. He was a taciturn man named Vernon Boyd, towering, barrel-chested and dressed pristinely in a well-tailored suit befitting of his occupation. Around them, the parlor in which Stiles awaited instruction, the house was coming alive. Savory scents from the kitchen and rebuilt fires saturated the air. What was it like to be roused to these smells, comfortably nestled in clean sheets atop a feather mattress? Stiles couldn’t picture it.

The Housekeeper adjusted his spotless white gloves as if a single wrinkle marring his appearance spoke ill of him.

“Master Hubbard has informed me of your situation,” he said without inflection and Stiles doubted the Mayor was the first source he had heard of the previous night’s events from. “It won’t do to have a Fox Child seen by the Mayor’s guests. You will take over the mending from Ms. Reyes. The sewing room is yours for the time being. You are responsible for keeping the room orderly, that includes the mopping and cleaning out the hearth. You will eat meals after the staff, in the kitchen at eight o’clock in the morning and eight o’clock in the evening and may attend church on Sundays. You will not fraternize with anyone. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Stiles said, eyes directed to the fine carpet under his feet.

“Good.”

“Housekeeper,” Stiles said quickly and Vernon observed him patiently, “My father is bedridden, I need to be allowed to go home to ensure he’s taken care of.”

“Yes, we have dispatched a message to Mr. Stilinski this morning informing him of your place here. You are allowed to walk home twice a day, but you will not be pardoned for any work going undone because of it. You are not the only staff member with sickly family.”

“Yes.”

The Housekeeper dismissed him and he retreated to the sewing room. He supposed it should have felt like a kind of prison with its sparse plaster walls and small, dusty window, but it was as Mayor Hubbard and the Reverend had said the previous night: he was here to preserve himself, to steal away. The room looked to be used frequently, but not by a dedicated seamstress. No one had taken the time to properly cleanse it; cobwebs were strung high in the eaves and dust clung thickly to the walls and corners, any place a person did not spend their time while mending.  

The only piece waiting to be repaired was his own shirt. It had been laid out on the table, already washed by the laundress, though still damp. Stiles took a breath, one of sudden relief to be in a room that was his and totally at his disposal and then went about hanging his shirt to finish drying. He found a scrub brush and pail in a cupboard in the corner with an assortment of other tools.

Nothing would be delivered to him that day and so he spent his time making the space his own. He scrubbed the floors until his hands ached and flushed out the hearth and found a woodpile down the hill from the manor to replace the burnt-out logs with. He shuffled the furniture until it pleased him. It was a welcome distraction when all his feet wanted was to fly home to his father but leaving the manor without any work done felt wrong. He did not want to trap himself inside of whatever box the Housekeeper currently kept him in based on whichever tall tales Vernon had heard.

He was a good worker out of necessity. People could shield their children from him, walk in the other direction when they saw him coming or stare and whisper, but they could never call him a lazy. Mr. Māhealani may not have harbored warm feelings for him and hardly spoke a word to him, but he knew that the man held his work-ethic in esteem, if he did not, he would not have accepted Stiles’s help during each Offering.

When the cleaning was done and his bones were aching, Stiles wrapped up in his coat and made his way swiftly from the manor, taking great care to go unnoticed. The Housekeeper had said he was free to go but leaving still felt like slacking. The two feelings, that of homesickness and shucking his duties cut him in two, one part tearing to return to his quiet little room in the manor and the other whipping to his father.

He was running by the time he reached the barley fields separating the Manor and his father’s house. The barren, sugar-dusted plots were soon giving way to a patch of wood, one he knew better than any other. He would forage in these trees in the summer months for mushrooms and blackberries, sometimes with Scott when he was younger and sometimes alone, wanting to hare through the forest unseen, climbing the trees and hollering like an animal or mimicking bird songs. The limbs still held on to their coverings, thousands of russet and gold leaves growing brittle and chattering with the playful wind.  

Stiles stopped hands on his knees, his breath fogging in front of his face as he panted. A column of smoke was rising from the chimney of his father’s house. The whole village must have known of the offering plate’s destruction by now, even if they hadn’t seen it with their own eyes. One of the neighbors must have been kind enough to check in on John when the brushfire-gossip spread. No one ever cast accusation on John for Stiles’s birth, not in the way they had Claudia. He was a victim of her choice to become round with child rather than complicit in it. John always dried Stiles’s tears when the other children said cruel things to him and insisted that he and Claudia knew what they wanted when they conceived him and that was a fat, healthy baby.

John did not tell him that story anymore. After all of the misfortune, the deaths tolling around them, Stiles knew, that even if his father never admitted to it, his sureness of Stiles’s goodness was faltering. If he could, Stiles would have reversed time and scolded the child he had been, told him not to be such a terror always running place to place, yelling at the top of his lungs, coming home scraped up with his hair snarled and littered with leaves. Or maybe he would have told his parents not to be so foolish; told them to wait for Rabbit or Doe to return to Last Rest.

He kicked the snow from his boots on the door frame before entering. There was stew bubbling over the hearth and he knew instantly the smell, recalled shoveling it down at Melissa’s table. She was knelt by the fire; her hands soot-stained and froze when her eyes fell on him. They regarded each other, but there was nothing either of them had to say to each other. Last night he had seen exactly what he was to her and it saddened him, maybe because he thought she still saw him as she had when she first held him after he was born. Made from love and nothing else like his father had said.

He moved to his father’s bedroom and just before he pushed open the door she said, “Don’t tell your father.”

He couldn’t look at her and kept on his way.

Tears sprang into John’s eyes when he saw his son and Stiles ran across the room into his embrace. His father held him fast and tight, hand in his hair. He held Stiles back from him a moment later and, like shattered glass, asked, “What have they done to my son?” His thumb stroking the bandaged cut on Stiles’s cheek. Only a few hours of healing would have made the wounds look worse as bruises always seemed to worsen before fading.

Stiles’s eyes met the floor. He couldn’t stand to hear his father’s voice trembling this way.

“I’m sorry,” broke out of Stiles as a sob when he hadn’t known he was about to cry. And John folded him back in against himself.

“It’s not your fault, Stiles,” John said fiercely, “You didn’t do this.” His father never blamed him. He always threw his anger on the Fox, always. And there was never any comfort in it for Stiles. He wasn’t the Fox, but it worked through him as a channel to spread its viciousness and he couldn’t help drowning in his responsibility to keep it at bay. When Fox broke away to wreak its havoc, there was always Stiles’s failing to contain it bold and prevalent in his mind.  

Stiles told his father that the Mayor would keep him on for a while and that he was being treated well. He said nothing of Reverend Whittemore or the Hales. Both would only turn his father’s stomach with nerves. He could not stay long, could not curl up at the foot of his father’s bed as he wished to. He filled a bag with his spare homespun clothes and the wool stuffed pillow from his bed, one embroidered by his mother’s hand. Before he left, he promised his father he would return tomorrow and Melissa pushed an apple into his palm without a word.

As he slowly trudged back through the empty fields, he ate it, core and all. He hadn’t had the time to realize he’d not eaten a morsel since his breakfast the day before and now that he had seen his father, found that he was being cared for, he was exhausted. His stomach whined for more when there would be none until supper. He picked some mint leaves from a stubborn clump of sprigs refusing to wither in the cold and chewed them to abate his hunger. The snow was not deep, not yet, but it was enough to make his journey arduous and his feet freeze as it melted into his socks.

Stiles passed through the servants’ halls as a ghost. The others were in the house, this place and that, quietly speaking as they worked, though he saw no one. When he opened the door to the sewing room, he found the space in tatters. All of his work undone by muddied boot prints on the floor and handprints on the walls, the furniture tossed over scattering bobbins of thread and needles and pins. Scrawled into the brick above the fireplace were the words _Fox Whore_ written in horse shit from the stable.

 

When Stiles was twelve, he had been locked in a broom cupboard behind the schoolhouse while the other children chanted “Whore! Whore! Whore!” over and over, even if they didn’t quite understand the word.

Stiles hadn’t, not the way an adult understood it.

There were some prostitutes that enticed travelers along the highways, people who sold their bodies to strangers as his father had delicately put it. That was not the meaning behind their song, though. The Fox’s whores were those that gave into the wildness of it, that worshiped its chaos and there were stories folk liked to tell of people born to the Fox spreading their legs and begging common forest foxes to spill seed in them.

No matter how he screamed, banged on the locked door, made his fists bloodied on the planks, no one set him loose. Their teacher finally came when the children had gone home and let him out. She was disgusted, her face pinched when she laid eyes on Stiles’s ragged knuckles and urine-soaked trousers. She had told John that it wasn’t right that Stiles be so upset by pranks of other children, that he should go so far as to soil himself or send himself into a frenzy like he had; like a caged animal would. The teacher had known he was trapped there, Stiles found out later, had seen the closet shuddering with his panic to escape, and thought it better he be left there until he was calm.

He had never regained himself in that suffocating well, he had fought until the door swung open.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey thanks for reading! i hope you enjoy reading it as much as i enjoy writing the dern thing.
> 
> not much to say for this post. i'm pretty scattered and dealing with a pinched nerve. so that's fun. 
> 
> please lemme know what you thought! 
> 
> hugs and kisses,  
> Zaphod


	4. Chapter 4

Stiles missed his suppertime cleaning the room; setting things back the way they had been. And he was _angry._ He didn’t ordinarily allow himself that emotion, that or sadness. What would he do with himself if he was so consumed? Inexplicably, the destruction of his room dredged from him more anger than he could contain and he caught up his scrub brush and hurled it at the wall hard enough for the handle to crack and he _screamed_ into the pillow his mother had made him. Why did he fight Fox’s influence at all if no matter what he did he would never be anything but a fox to everyone around him?

He had shouldered each new disaster with reserve or taken his punishments with as much dignity as he could and for what? A place in Heaven? As if Fox would release his soul from its maw because he had died. It would go with him to that bright place or burn with him in Hell. His father’s watery eyes from that afternoon returned to his mind and he was ashamed at his thoughts, at insinuating, even privately to himself, that he was exempt from sin because of the circumstance of his birth. Breath poured from him hoarsely as he stared at his scrub brush.

He carefully massaged his face as to not disturb his injuries.

Stiles was startled at the sound of his door creaking open and found Miss Cora standing above him wrapped up like a Yuletide gift in red satin and ebony ribbons. To see her so clearly now, his eye having eased back open, he saw that she was very young, no more than fifteen, young enough to wear her dark, wavy hair unpinned.

She curtsied to him, a pleasantry he had never been on the receiving end of and he stood hastily to bow.

“Mr. Stilinski,” she said graciously, “I’ve come to ask you to dinner in my family’s rooms.”

Surely the Reverend would excuse his speaking to her long enough to decline? His throat tied itself up unforgivingly.

“I do not wish to embarrass you, Mr. Stilinski, but my brother overhead some of what was said between yourself and Reverend Whittemore last night,” she told him and she looked like Derek then, devoid of pity for his situation and interested only in what was before her. “This shall be a private dinner, I swear it. No one will know you have eaten with us as the rest of Mayor Hubbard’s staff are currently setting out his supper and our own household will be taking care of us.”

But she was just a child. A lady of breeding, self-assured by her station in society, though a child nonetheless and an outsider. She could not comprehend life in Last Rest as he did. The Hales would leave this place eventually, but he would have to continue living here under the Whittemore’s acute gaze.

Stiles shook his head.

Cora was not the kind of person accustomed to being told ‘no’. Her brow furrowed. She crowded him and he stumbled back, but she was upon him all the same and she growled, “We both know that I did not have to protect you in the church. _You_ asked me to and now you will do this thing for me or you will regret it.”

“I can’t,” shook out of Stiles.

“I say you _can_.” And she snatched his wrist and dragged him from the room with strength unbefitting a girl her age and size. She near snapped his arm like a twig in her iron grasp. He wanted to rip away from her, tell her to stop being a brat, tell her she didn’t know a God damned thing about him or his town, that she was an interloper set on assuring his flogging in the town square. Sparks of flame built in his throat and those words threatened, they scorched, but he fought them down. These were Fox’s whisperings, urging him to use his tongue as a whip.

Cora stopped occasionally on their route, listening for activity around corners and to Stiles’s surprise she was skilled enough at sneaking place to place; she delivered him to her family’s rooms unseen, as promised. The look she shot him after closing the door behind them was deserved for doubting her but did not change the fact that she had forced him here against his will.

Mrs. Hale was waiting for them clad in an exquisite black lace evening gown that made Stiles feel cheap and inconsequential by comparison. His belly wobbled on seeing her. He should have twisted away from Cora, done as the Reverend said and stayed well away from the Hales. But it was too late for that now. This is where Fox wanted to be, what better place to run amuck while trapped in this house?

“My name is Thalia Hale,” Mrs. Hale said, offering him a hand to shake, rather than knuckles to kiss.

The pain in his throat felt as though he had swallowed an egg whole and he nodded, shaking her hand, his palm sweaty.

“I’m pleased you’ve joined us,” she said in that rich voice, dark as coffee. She had sprayed on a little perfume, one that was spicy and wild smelling like tiger lilies after a storm. “You do not know me, Mr. Stilinski, and you have no reason to trust me, as I am certain there are not many you do trust, but I hope that you come to understand that I am a person of my word. No harm will come to you here and none will know that you have been with us. My servants travel with us and are loyal to me.”

He nodded again, seemingly incapable of doing anything else and he head was reeling with the surrealness of her. He had heard sweet promises like Thalia’s before and he had seen them thrown aside as trash.

Her fingertips grazed his chin and he flinched. Her eyes were huge and dark and patient, like Danny’s. Her hand returned slowly to tip his chin up toward her. She beamed at him, “You have lovely eyes, Mieczyslaw.” And he felt like a child under her gaze, he felt as he had that night listening to Melissa’s kind words from the top of the stairs. Earnestness shined out from her beautiful face.

Stiles wet his lips, his chest beating dully, threatening to pick up and make him dizzy.

“Come,” she said, guiding him to the parlor. Gathered there among the overstuffed leather chairs and ornately decorated room and blazing fireplace were Mr. Hale and the eldest daughter, Cora having disappeared somewhere into the ether. “This Laura Hale,” said Thalia, her hand coming to the small of his back as if she were ready to catch him should he fall, “and my brother, Peter.”

Peter Hale raised an eyebrow toward him from where he was sprawled on one of the sofas, sipping from a crystal tumbler filled with amber liquor and Laura curtsied gracefully. Thalia brought him to one of the chairs; its upholstery treated to a rich walnut color and it welcomed him, cradled his tired back and shoulders. A servant brought him a goblet of mulled wine and the cup looked absurd in his hand, highlighting how out of place he was with his swollen knuckles and knobby fingers.

He stared at the spiced liquid, a drink he only ever tasted at the village feast during Yule. He took a sip and then another and another until the cup was empty and his head swam and the servant was there again with a decanter to refill it for him. The Hales were silent as he drank. Inviting him here at all was likely to suit the purpose of entertainment in this drab little town when they were accustomed to better, more exotic amenities wherever they had come from. But Stiles was too tired to be insulted. If they wished to make fun of him or marvel at his unrefined manners, at least their wine would put him to a good, dreamless sleep.

Halfway through his second glass, he slowed, the sweetness making his teeth hurt. Peter Hale was watching him amusedly.

“Mieczyslaw, I’d like to tell you why we’ve come here,” said Thalia.

“Stiles,” Stiles blurted and his drowsy brain realized he had drunk too much and eaten nothing.

“ _What_ is a Stiles?” chuckled Peter.

Stiles glanced at his glass and back up at Peter. He was already here, already certain to be strapped down and whipped for speaking to them against Whittemore’s wishes, so he said, “My father calls me Stiles.”

Thalia gave a small smile and said, “Stiles,” rolling the name around in her mouth and it was pleasant to hear it brightened by her cadence. “You were born here, Stiles?” she asked and he nodded, taking another swig. “Then you are a valuable source of local knowledge for us,” she said, “I own a fur trading company based out of Hollow Tree, a town farther north. We are looking to establish a new trading post here in Last Rest. The pass through the mountains may be blocked during the winter, but it is the most direct route to the capital and cities on the coast. Before committing, I need to be certain that this town is a good match for our values. And, honestly Stiles, I was appalled at what I saw in the square yesterday evening. Are there many Fox Children living here?”

Stiles’s stomach soured. He’d not thought much of the motivations behind Reverend Whittemore’s warning or the Mayor’s fretting in the church.

“I shouldn’t be here,” Stiles said suddenly, and tried to stand, but Thalia was there putting a gentle hand to his shoulder.

“My Darling,” she said, and it saddened him to hear the honesty in her voice, as if she really thought of him as dear to her, “I apologize. I will ask you no more of this. As I said, you have no reason to trust us. Have dinner with us at the very least.”

He couldn’t deny her. If she asked him again about himself, about Fox Children, he would have cut open each of his seams so that she might better see his stuffing. It shook him down to his bones at his need to please her, even knowing nothing about her.

Thalia took his arm as they all moved to the dining room. He had never had a woman on his arm before, and he was a stumbling child walking with her, like a child chasing after his mother’s skirts. She sat him down in a plush chair before a place setting with more flatware and goblets than he knew what to do with.

Thalia whispered to him discreetly, “Work from the outside in.” Across from him, Peter chuckled again as if he had been able to hear her. “Laura,” she then said, taking her place at the head of the grand table, “where are the rest of my children?”

“Conspiring together to be sure,” Laura said disinterestedly, sipping politely at her wine.

“Stiles,” Thalia sighed through a smile, “A strapping young man like you is sure to marry a pretty little thing and have a brood of children to chase after, just know that they are as much a curse as they are a blessing.”

He forced a smile. He saw no utility in correcting her. He would never marry, never subjugate someone he loved to the will of the Fox. He caught his reflection in the high shine of one of his spoons. His face was a hideous splash of sickly colors, his skin too pale and dusty with stubble. He looked a sleepless ghoul compare to the Hales; an insult to their beautifully made table.

“While we wait,” Thalia said, “Is there anything you would like to know about us, Stiles?”

He tore his eyes away from his reflection, “Um,” he had meant to tell her, no, not wanting to pry, despite her invitation, but her warm eyes were on him again and he couldn’t bring himself to say it. “Where – are you from?” he tried, straining to remember the last time he had ever made pleasant dinner-talk with anyone. John hardly spoke to him while they ate supper together.

“Beyond the Wall,” Peter said into his glass and Stiles stared at him.

Thalia cleared her throat, “Peter, such jokes are made in poor taste here, I think.”

“Is it in poor taste, _Stiles_?” Peter goaded.

“Yes,” Stiles told him bluntly.

He thought Mr. Hale might challenge him or say something crasser, but instead, he said, “Then I offer my apologies.” Somehow, it was as though he were still taunting Stiles.

“We are from Fever Hill,” Thalia said, flinging castigating eyes on her brother, “A town farther north than even Hollow Tree. Have you traveled at all?”

Still holding Peter’s bemused gaze, Stiles answered with a curt, “No.”

“You must go to the sea someday,” Thalia said, “It is a humbling experience.”

Stiles drank down the rest of his wine and said, “If it’s all the same, this town will kill me before my twenty-fifth birthday; no point daydreaming about the sea.”

This looked to stump and mildly upset Thalia, though the grin on Peter’s arrogant mouth only widened and Laura put in, “I like him, Mother.”

“So, there is a person in there after all,” Peter sniggered and Stiles stared flatly at him as their servant brought his empty glass back up its round middle.

“Personally, I enjoy a Fox Child,” said Laura thoughtfully, “They’re rather wily.”

Stiles’s guts whined and slurring slightly, wine and exhaustion rushing to his head he said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Agreed,” said Peter, twisting to face his niece, “You should shut your trap before you catch a fly.”

“ _Mother_!” Laura squawked and the same time Thalia gave an exasperated, “ _Peter.”_

“Come now, Tally, your daughter’s a spoiled twit to say such a thing to our guest and you know it,” Peter scoffed.

“ _I am not a twit, Uncle Peter_ ,” growled Laura, the poise Stiles had first seen her wielding melting away, “I said I _like_ Fox Children.”

“Yes dear, you _like_ a sophomoric generalization of them,” Peter retorted.

“As if you know _anything_ about their circumstances,” Laura bit out, “Why would Stiles even be here if you did?” Stiles. Not Mischief. Not Mr. Stilinski. When Thalia spoke his name, it was as if she were his mother and him one of her children, but when Miss Laura said it, there was no nectar dripping off her tongue. She said it as she would call the name of a horse or her dog.

“Please, _both of you_ ,” barked Thalia, but neither of them paid her any mind.

“My dear, I’m not the one talking about Stiles like he is not sitting at this table.”

Laura rolled her eyes, “Stop attempting to make drama where there is none, Uncle. Is that your plan? Turn Stiles against me to make him feel as though _you’re his friend_?” and then her attention was affixed to Stiles and all he could do was gawk at her, “He thinks he’s clever enough to manipulate you into helping us.”

Each hair on Stiles’s body stood on end, his skin vibrating. Whittemore’s warning to stay away might not only have been to keep him from saying something that might risk new industry in Last Rest. There was a presence in the room, stalking under the table, along the mantle of their hearth; one not unlike that of the Fox. When it drew near, he could taste it in the air, that musky, wooden scent of the forest creeping in around him. Though he wore boots, he swore he could feel loam under his bare feet and see his breath before him, but, no, no he was still in the Mayor’s House, far from the Wall and the Wood beyond it.

“You are paranoid, child,” Peter chuckled, “I am merely suggesting that your interest in our guest comes from a place of ignorance to wit, Stiles seems to agree.”

A thump on the table’s surface sent a jump through the plates and set the glasses ringing and clinking together and Stiles’s heart nearly stopped. Thalia hand was in a fist beside her plate, her eyes burning red stars, red like the Devil and the sound, the sound of animal fear he had sputtered in the square returned.

“That is _enough_ ,” she said, the words coming from somewhere deep in her chest. Peter cleared his throat and spoke to her as Cora had spoken to Derek, without words and Thalia looked at her fist as if shocked to see the anger in it. Her eyes went to Stiles where he was rooted to his seat, heart tripping and engorged, managing to fill up his chest up to his throat. But her eyes were brown as they had always been; large and comforting and stunned by her own behavior.

“I apologize, child,” she said quickly, swiping a few fingers across her brow, almost self-consciously.

“It’s nearly nine o’clock,” chirped Cora, sweeping in from a side hall papered much like her crimson, satin dress, “Have I missed the nightly argument or has it only just begun?” No one dignified her with an answer. She glided a scarlet swan on calm water, to her seat beside her uncle.

“Cora, we are all quite hungry,” Thalia said, having fully regained herself, “Where is my son?”

“Searching for his red petticoat.”

Soft yet biting laughter trickled from Peter, though Thalia was not amused by a word of it. She looked the picture of a mother struggling with her composure over the unmannered spouting of her children. And there was an incompleteness to what Stiles was observing. The girls’ insubordination did not easily conjoin to Thalia’s authority, as if her speaking, ordering them to behave themselves was only half of the conversation, the other half missing, a sheaf of pages torn from the end of a book.

“I would leave him to his sulking, sister,” Peter advised and again there was piece gone from his statement.

“Very well,” Thalia signaled to one of her valets and soon platters and tureens of all shapes came pouring through the room on a torrent of crisp black uniforms and starched aprons. As his plate was filled for him, Stiles’s stiff, aching posture unwound. He was drunk and afraid of Whittemore’s threats and seeing things that were not there. Fox must have taken great delight in his panic, in making him think such ghastly thoughts about a woman who had been so kind to him when she had no reason to be. Holding his silverware in still-shaking hands proved a challenge and he could hear the breathy, gasping laughter of the Fox, where it curled up under his chair.

The Hales politely pretended not to notice his ugly, trembling fingers.

“Who are your people, Mr. Stilinski?” asked Cora, a perfectly small bit of roast beef skewered on her fork. She made the food appear more refined than it was. He had never heard of wealthy folk serving poor man’s supper. During the last Yule Banquet, the Mayor and Headwoman’s table had sported at least six fat pheasants and a suckling pig.

He quickly wiped a trail of gravy from his chin, his own plate empty already, “My father was the sheriff.” He grappled with the rest of the story, the beginning and the end, people who had been that were no longer and decided the Hales had no business leafing through his pain.

“Was?” Cora asked, earning a daggered stare from her mother. Stiles did not indulge her. He sat back in his chair as his plate was removed and contemplated whether it would be rude to ask for a second helping. Melissa used to make a roast not so different from this one when her husband could afford the meat. Her cottage would smell of nothing else for hours after it was done, of slowly cooked meat and herbs and fat and her special onions and potatoes spiced with rosemary. He and Scott would lounge by the low-burn of the fire, their bellies distended from the feast, laughing at nothing and soaking in the painful-pleasant feeling of being overstuffed.

“Stiles?”

He blinked a few times, his eyes scrunching on the last. He had forgotten his tea at his father’s house. It tasted like lamp oil and smelled no better; it made him stupid when he drank it, but without it his body was open to ticks and twitches, open like a door to any creature that craved a hand at controlling his unguarded limbs. The Hales had been speaking still and he had heard none of it.

“I should go,” he said, but when he stood from the table, his brains seemed to swoop forward and he fell back into his chair. Mrs. Hale croaked his name, lurching upward from her seat and then began barking orders at Peter. Stiles tried to tell them he was fine, that being touched would make him worse, that he was merely fatigued from the day, but no useful thoughts made it to his mouth.

Peter lifted him.

Panic ratcheted up his nape and struck out, flailing, hardly cognoscente of anything other than the need to escape as if he were trapped in a beast’s jaws. The man did not drop him or even falter. He offered only a grunt as he carried Stiles to the den and laid him on one of the sofas. Peter was not so much larger than Stiles; perhaps a breath taller, and yet so strong, strong like Cora and Derek, strong enough to make Stiles an insect so little was the worth of his own strength. He pressed himself back into the cushions, panting and sweating and – his thoughts were everything, everything he had ever known and it made his neck heat up and seize and he shut his eyes.

Above him they Hales were moving, speaking in hushed voices and he was mortified to be worked into this state in front of them a second time in as many days. Any space that contained this family was heightened. The walls were too brittle to hold all of them, the floors too flimsy under their feet. They should not be locked in a house, away from the rain and clean air and it made him dizzy.

A glass of water appeared under his nose, Thalia hovering closely behind it, too present and unwrinkled by worry or any other arrangement of emotions taught to be befitting of a female. He took it and drank deeply until it was empty.

“You have an interesting gift, Stiles,” she said quietly, taking the cup from him, “How old are you?”

He did not strain to understand any of what she said and concentrated on distracting the anxiety mounting still in his gut by answering, “Twenty-two.”

She nodded in thought, “You require a good night's sleep,” though, that was not what she had meant to say. It was locked behind her eyes, whatever it was, peering out, but indistinguishable. He nodded, counting his breaths as he did. Just over her shoulder stood the girls, whispering back and forth, and Peter sat casually in another of the many beautifully made wing-backed chairs and in the doorway to the dining room Stiles caught the back of a waistcoat and rolled white sleeves and thick, black hair leaving the frame they had been standing by.

A ghost, maybe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh shit. what's this? two posts back to back. who's driving this train thERE'S A MAN ON THE WING.
> 
> i thought that the previous chapter was a little short and maybe needed a day to percolate before adding this one - lol the main course - or something. dinner with the Hales. this is pretty much my favorite section. like, the rest of it was fun to write, but there's something special about the first real introduction. it's nice writing a version of peter that's just a douche rather than evil af. 
> 
> also i started spelling 'talia' as 'thalia' for literally no other reason than i like it that way. 
> 
> thanks for reading! feedback always appreciated! you're great!


	5. Chapter 5

The Hales did not call on him again. His days passed as a wind of fabric and needles. The Mayor’s daughter was always ripping the lace cuffs of her gowns. One day he might grow tired of mending it, of the strain it brought to his eyes, but he was content to do it. He had never run his fingers over such fine cloth before and liked the roughness of it in his palms. Needles bit his fingers occasionally, drawing pricks of blood that smeared on whatever he worked on. He grew accustomed to keeping a small washing board and pail underneath his work table and would bounce his foot against them as he worked.

He ate alone in the kitchen, without seeing so much as the cook or the scullery maids. The house was endless in its rooms and corridors, and always, always empty. He would take to wondering the slumbering halls during the nights sleep did not visit and would allow his mind to wonder, to fantasize that he was the master of this place. He would imagine the scurry of feet, of his servants avoiding his gaze as he came and went.

 

Whoever had dirtied the sewing room did not return again. No, they found other ways to torment him and he stopped suspecting it to be the doing of one person, but rather, several.

Vernon Boyd tossed the young lady’s gown down on Stiles’s table while he stood before him, head down and hands clasped behind him.

“If you cannot complete your duties, you will be reassigned to mucking out stables,” Vernon told him. His face did not change as he spoke. He had no anger in his eyes or pity, only impatience. He would not say so aloud, but Stiles’s presence here was a disruption, one that he would never have allowed if Mayor Hubbard had not ordered it himself. The sleeves of the gown had each had Stiles’s meticulous stitching torn out by the end of something sharp, a penknife perhaps, and a new rip was gouged along the hem.

“I apologize,” Stiles said through his teeth, glaring at the floor.

“Mend it. Quickly. Miss Henrietta expects to wear it for supper.”

Stiles nodded and waited until Vernon was gone from the room to cast disparaging eyes on the garment. It had been perfect when he had left it on the hanger outside his room that morning. This trick was played on him again and again, revisited without imagination or change, over the following fortnight until Stiles took to delivering his work to the closets of the owners himself only after allowing for the Housekeeper’s approval. He sensed listening ears when he went to Vernon’s office, maybe even muffled voices in the halls and the undoing of his work ended.

 

His father would ask him about the Manor each day when he visited, asking after gossip specifically, but Stiles had none to offer. Melissa was always there, milling about the chores Stiles used to complete. It would not have done for her to move in with his father as they were unmarried and John told him she walked home each night, but there was a quilt folded neatly in the sitting room on one of the sofas and books Stiles did not recognize sometimes piled by the fireplace. She was alone and Stiles could not fault her this, her seeking out company in the dark of winter, and if it resulted in his father not being alone at night he would say nothing of it. He thought of thanking her one day as he passed her in the winter garden, pulling up broad beans. Their eyes met, but somehow, he knew thanks coming for his lips would be fouled to her and he said nothing.

He returned that evening to find his cot wet and rank with piss.

 

When he was seven years old and his mother ill with brain fever, his father had sent him from the house to fetch bread from the Elsie’s. She had baked special braided pan challah for Claudia, a loaf she used to walk to town each Saturday morning to purchase. He had stood on the balls of his toes to see the display platters in the window, all sprinkled with flour or dotted with fruits and the smells of baking wrapped him up. Elsie packaged the bread in crinkly brown paper and sent him on his way with a handful of black cherries.

Some boys found him on the road: Jackson Whittemore and Halsey Smith and Danny. They pushed him down and took his parcel and stripped him naked and laughed at the little worm between his legs. Jackson and Halsey whipped him with thin switches from the woods until he was freckled with scarlet welts. Of them, only Danny was unnerved by what they had done, his eyes cow-like as they retreated, throwing glances over his shoulder.

Stiles didn't remember how he had gotten home. 

His father brought him to his room, telling him to hold in his tears, telling him not to wail and to cover up because his mother wasn’t strong enough to see her child this way. It was the first night he could recall feeling the Fox. It had been there always, perhaps, sneaking unseen at the edges of his vision. It boiled his blood once the tears were gone and he lay in bed, alone and reliving the stings from the branches.

 _Mischief, mischief, mischief_ it purred like a madman, crouched under his bed.

When he woke in the morning news had spread to his father that the chapel’s coop had been broken in to and all the of hens were torn apart. It couldn’t have been an animal, they said, because none of them had been eaten.

 

Frigid air laced with tiny icicles nipped at Stiles’s cheeks, around him tinkering and clopping of shod hooves and conversation wove into the coldness of the market, warming it some. A peddler showed him wares from a large leather case set open on the square’s fountain rim. Rows of cloths and ribbon and thread and buttons were neatly arranged on the case’s walls, all the finest quality available, the peddler assured him. He bartered for some new ribbon Miss Henrietta might like to decorate her bonnet with, new needles and a spool of black thread to replace the one in his cupboard that was nearly bare.

He thanked the peddler and was given a bow and flip of the man’s top hat. He was from someplace away from here; his skin browned in the sun of a hotter province and spending the winter months with family in town. He did a bit of sleight of hand and pulled a cloth flower from his hat and offered it to Stiles, gold molars winking at the back of his grin. And Stiles smiled back, though his teeth remained hidden.

“I couldn’t,” Stiles told him. The peddler’s flower was lovely and lovely things would not last, even hidden away, if he kept them.

The peddler stepped in and so close Stiles could smell a rich all-spice perfume on his neck. As if they were gossiping school children he said secretly, “No need for false modesty my dear; you have an eye for beautiful things. I’ve been told that the ribbon you bought was too plain, alas, most seamstresses lack vision. Ribbon such as this is truly beautiful _because_ it is plain, don’t you think?”

Stiles’s smile stretched and he may have flushed, though it might have been the cold bringing out his color. He pressed the flower in Stiles’s hand, “Everyone deserves a pretty thing from time to time,” and the man’s mouth was close enough to his ear that his breath brushed against it, sending a thrum down Stiles’s measure. He pocketed the flower and thanked the peddler. How many flowers did he give out a day, Stiles wondered, hundreds maybe, if he was any sort of decent salesman.

 He had not taken five steps from the fountain before a pillar of black was before him, blocking his way. He did not startle at the sudden materialization, rather he held his satchel strap close to his body, protecting his things.

“May I walk with you?” asked Derek Hale and to hear his voice felt out of place mingled with the familiar bustle of his town. The words were ground out as if under a pestle. Stiles’s mouth was parted and he snapped it shut. His eyes darted, searching briefly for the Reverend, but it was a futile act; a village this small required only one set of eyes, any eyes, for talk to spread and meet ears it should not.

“No,” Stiles told him abruptly and then, “thank you.” It was no fault of Mr. Hale’s that he should retreat so quickly and there was no need to be terribly rude. Stiles bid him a good day and turned to trot the other way, back toward the manor. He visited town so infrequently now, he had wished to wander a bit longer even if exposing himself to the square may have been against his better interest. But that short interaction was not the end of it, as it should have been.

He chanced a glance over his shoulder to confirm what the puckering of his skin was telling him: Derek Hale walked behind him, at a semi-respectful distance, and looked unbothered by the intrusion of it. He stared at Stiles, holding his gaze in a way that was improper, the way a predator might and it sent a lick of fear up his spine. Rich men liked to dally with servants, liked to force themselves on them and leave them pregnant and shamed, untouchable.

Stiles took quicker steps and Hale followed easily.

He reached the road that would bring him up the slope to the Manor, but it was a long way through fallowed fields where there would be no one. His teeth gritted, Stiles turned slowly, standing straight to hide the fear cowering in his belly, “Mr. Hale, I know what people say or what you might have heard. I’m not some slut you can force down in a field.”

Derek’s brow raised his mouth a hard line. His stare sharp enough to flay skin, he said, “I know.”

“Then – then leave me alone. I’ve work,” Stiles stammered.

“You shouldn’t be walking by yourself,” was the only response he received.

“I’ll manage.”

He turned his back and it felt wrong, like turning his back on a black bear in the forest. When he looked back to be certain Hale was no longer tailing him, there was no one on the road, as if he had imagined all of it.

 

Melissa was working herself down to the bone maintaining both houses. She would never say a word about her struggle, she was just that sort of woman. But Stiles saw the tears in her dresses, the fraying hemlines going untailored. He mentioned it to John, that it would be no imposition for him to take one of her dresses back with him to the Manor. His father knew Melissa’s pride better than anyone, he supposed, and Stiles was unsurprised when John told him where she hid the spare key to her house. He warned that Stiles should not take anything he could not return within a day.

Stiles entered the house the next day. He did not linger there long; he retrieved the dress not being worn at the moment. Once safely in hand, he had meant to leave the cottage without any thoughts and without indulging the sour tinge of nostalgia. But he paused, without ordering his feet to do so, outside of the closed door to Scott’s room. Maybe it still smelled a bit like him, like soap and brightness. But that wasn’t possible.

Scott was in a box in the ground and had been there rotting for six years.

 

There was a great, black dog in the snowy fields at dawn as Stiles walked to his father’s house before the Manor began to stir. It sat at the edge of the forest, near indistinguishable from the trees. It would vanish and reappear as a specter would, sometimes trotting along the tree line, or sitting like an obsidian tower. Stiles quickened his pace, though it was too far off to be much of a nuisance. If it charged him he would have plenty of time to skitter up a tree or to some other hiding place.

The dog was there again when he returned to the Manor and every day after, walking with him always at a great distance and he wondered if it were tame, a shepherd’s dog run away from home. It became a fixture, no different from the road or the banks of snow and sometimes Stiles would break into a run and the dog would jolt into movement as well and they would sprint to until Stiles was out of breath. Sometimes, if the light was right, he would catch a glimpse of a long, pink tongue flopping from the beast’s mouth.

Those were days he felt – days that he _could_ feel.

 

Miss Henrietta’s mother was a stone-matron. Her waist so thin and spine so tight she likely had had no need of a corset in many years. She liked to wander the halls with a white glove to test the surfaces of her home for dust. She liked to strike the housemaids. Stiles would see them sometimes, one or two crouched to the floor in the dormitories cradling their faces and weeping silently. He did whatever he could to avoid her and was so successful at it that when he tried to imagine her face he could never get its features quite right.

He climbed the stairs to replace one of Miss Henrietta’s dresses, humming softly to himself. During the day the family had other matters to attend to, most of them in town and he did not have to scurry like a mouse to avoid them. When he reached Miss Henrietta’s doors a couple of maids saw him and hurried away, chuckling with hands cupping their mouths. There was a crash from inside the room and he froze when he heard Mrs. Hubbard’s strict voice. He thought he should intervene when he then heard Miss Henrietta sobbing, but what could he have done for her that would not have hurt them both?

He folded her dress neatly and left in on the cupboard in the hall.

These were days he felt nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> editing is dumb. 
> 
> but here it is! just in time for happy hour. 
> 
> to prepare for said happy hour i will be cramming everything in my pantry that's about to expire in my face. WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE.
> 
> thanks for reading my dudes! feedback always encouraged!


	6. Chapter 6

He came into his sewing room to find the Reverend sitting at his chipped table, hands flat on its surface. There was static about him, the build of something shocky just before the sting of it and Stiles wet his lips. He hung his satchel by the door as collectedly as he could. He had been expecting another visit, dreading it, and each day his little room went empty only made the feeling worse. The Hales promised to keep the dinner a secret, but they did not understand how even one slipped word might evolve and spread. And how many people had seen Derek Hale approach him?

Surely Whittemore could forgive him that; he had done nothing to encourage the attention, had even told Mr. Hale to leave him be in no uncertain terms.

“Reverend-,”

“Take off your clothes,” Whittemore said. His voice came from him calmly, but it was a forced calm. Stiles was very still, still as the dead, a rabbit frozen in front of a wolf. No, not a wolf. Fox was looking at him now, through the Reverend’s eyes and it was starved in the harshness of the winter. He knew it was growing ravenous out beyond the Wall; no meat to gorge itself on and no warm place to sleep.

Stiles was naked already under that stare.

“This isn’t your doing,” he said carefully.

“Take off your clothes before I do,” his voice as placid as before, “you don’t want me to have to do it.”

“I have work to do,” Stiles told him and his pitted eyes grew jagged as a sawtooth.

“Take off your clothes you fucking _slut_ ,” Whittemore said standing from the table so suddenly it bucked forward, toppling bobbins as it jerked. Stiles’s back hit the door before he had registered his backing away.

“ _Stop_ calling me a _slut_ ,” came from somewhere inside of him; from the child locked in the broom cupboard.

A rasp of horrible laughter exited Whittemore as he drew nearer, “My wife won’t touch me because of you, because of the disease _your cunt_ gave me.”

Stiles held firm, refused to allow himself to tremble as he had the last time. He had been a virgin with David, there was no disease to give, but these were truths Whittemore had not come to hear. From the blackness in his sunken eyes, there was nothing Stiles could say to him. Fox had deranged him and delivered him here to suit only one purpose.

He lunged at Stiles and Stiles got a hand on the door, was a step through when Whittemore brought him to the floor. He stank of spirits, his breath, his clothes, his hair; all of it a grotesque, sterile smelling fog that drowned out Stiles’s senses. The Reverend’s fist smashed into his cheek, relit the fires of his mostly healed bruises to make way for new ones and his vision went out for a few moments. Blindly he fought as Whittemore tore at his clothes grunting and drooling and trying to keep Stiles down while pulling his cock from his trousers.

Stiles’s eyes allotted him enough sight, just a crack of light through a door, to throw a punch. Whittemore’s head snapped back and he howled, both hands going to his nose, leaving Stiles forgotten long enough for him to scramble away. He bashed his knees and elbows and shoulder trying to escape, to navigate the hall when it was spinning and his mind was nothing reduced down to frothing fear and anger and shame. Whittemore screamed something behind him as he climbed the servant’s narrow staircase and burst through the door into one of the parlors.

There was blood gleaming on his hand when he swiped wetness from his nose. A woman’s scream pierced the room on seeing him; one of the housemaids, her feather duster dropped to the floor and both hands cupping her mouth. A shrill, “Housekeeper!” sprang from her lungs and Stiles propped himself against the door, panting, worrying over his leaking nose and cut under his eye. Vernon found him there, cradling his face and rocking back and forth.

“Come with me,” he said hastily, dragging Stiles up by his arm. He did not ask how Stiles had come to be there, did not ask him if he was in pain. Stiles struggled along behind him in a daze and before they made it very far, Peter Hale was there, looking vicious. His eyes swept over Stiles and then he whisked by them, a storm head blowing toward the servants’ stairs.

Boyd brought him to the den in the Hales’ rooms, depositing him on the sofa he had last sat in. Boots fell swiftly, stomping over the floors, and Derek Hale came into the room, red-faced from the cold, but wearing no coat, only plain black trousers and a loose white shirt, one that looked to have been thrown on in haste. He was across the sitting area a moment later, kneeling in front of Stiles.

“What happened?” he demanded. Frozen air radiated off of him and his hair wet with snowmelt.

“Mr. Hale has gone to investigate,” Boyd said for him when Stiles's mouth managed only to open and close of its own accord, “I believe Mr. Stilinski is still in shock.”

“Get me a bowl of hot water and a rag,” Derek snapped off and Boyd bowed as he turned to do as bidden.

“No,” Stiles choked out, and he could not place why and Derek looked at him unsteadily for the first time. His eyes were not green or blue, as Stiles had thought before, but a smear of colors, every color an eye could be. Stiles’s eyes scrunched closed as a pang racked his face, sending a throb through his skull and Derek’s hand closed on his arm. The contact might have made him flinch had he more wherewithal.

“Keep your eyes closed,” Derek murmured, thumb rubbing a path up and down, over the ball of his wrist. His mother used to tell him the same thing when he was frightened, just keep them closed, don’t look. Warmth gathered under Derek's hand like sunlight in late summer, balmy and pulsing and his pain flowed and ebbed, a tide receding. He should have yanked away his arm, should have run as fast as he could from that cursed house. But he could not.

A groan broke in his throat as the pain drained away and maybe it was witchcraft or something evil, but he had never felt so whole, so relieved. Not just the stabbing hurt of his face, but the sluggish pain of living as he did, the long days crouched over his table that made for bodily cramps as did cleaning and walking miles each afternoon to see his father. He hadn’t known he was filled with so much pain until it was all of it taken away.

“ _God_ ,” he moaned, leaning forward, folding in on himself as it was leeched and Derek’s free hand held his shoulder as he shuddered. Derek’s nose pressed into his hair and he breathed deeply. And it was not like any other person had ever touched him before. There was nothing the man could have wanted from him.

“Don’t open your eyes,” Derek told him again, butting his forehead to Stiles’s. His skin was still cold and damp, a welcome coolness to taper Stiles’s temperature; he was burning from all that had happened, his heart thump, thump, thumping.

Boyd brought the bowl and Derek dabbed red from Stiles’s face and Stiles could not have peeled his eyes open if he had wanted to. At Derek’s urging, he dropped onto the floor, between Hale's outstretched legs. It was wrong he should be put to so much ease in such proximity to a man he did not know, one he had thought might be capable of what Whittemore was. He was cornered by embarrassment over the absurdity of it, of thinking that Derek Hale could have ever done such a thing. Trusting him became simpler and simpler with every pass of the wet cloth, with the sound of it being wrung out. He could have fallen asleep there, curled up on Derek’s lap like he used to atop his father’s.

The door to the den crashed open, and Stiles’s eyes flew open as he wheeled around to find Whittemore stomping through it and Peter close behind him.

“He’s mad!” cried the Reverend, “The wretch attacked me in the hall!”

Derek’s gaze had been soft and uncomplicated before and now it was walled off, feral even. He was standing in a fluid motion, bringing Stiles up beside him.

“Name calling isn’t very Christian of you, Reverend,” Peter said with annoyance, coming to the Reverend’s side.

“If you do not call a constable, Mr. Hale –,”

“Choose your next words _very_ carefully,” Peter warned.

Whittemore licked his lips, taking in Peter’s menacing stance and then strode further into the room to throw an accusatory finger at Stiles. Derek put himself between them instantly, the flat of his palm going to Stiles’s belly and a rumble shook in his chest. And Stiles found himself again thankful he was not the on the receiving end of that glare.

“That boy is a _danger_ to us all,” shrieked Whittemore, his face crusted with blood.

“Is that true, Stiles?” Peter intoned disdainfully, his bladed eyes scouring the Reverend, “Are you _dangerous_? Or do the people in this backwater use the Fox as an excuse for their own repulsive fancies? Do they use it to justify _rape_ and torment _children_?”

“Mr. Hale you are treading-,”

Peter crowded him, squaring himself too closely for the Reverend’s liking and he staggered away, “If you come within twenty yards of that boy, of this _house,_ I will _snap_ your bones like twigs,” Peter purred, “You are a very _small_ man on a _very_ _small_ hill. Get. Out.”

The Reverend’s scowl pulled taut all of his skin, stretching it as if over a drum. He adjusted his robe, flicking out the lapels of it and ran a hand through his frantic, steel-colored hair. He had the nerve to hold Peter’s stare until turning to leave.

Mr. Hale sighed, swiping a hand across his chin.

When he faced them he said dryly, “Well, nephew, I  hope you’re pleased." 

 

Thalia and the girls had gone to town for shopping with the Mayor’s wife. While they waited, Peter had Stiles’s things moved from the sewing room to one of the spare ones in the wing they were occupying. He then went to speak to Mayor Hubbard and Stiles did what he could not to dwell on what they would be speaking about.

He stayed on the sofa, arms braced on his knees and head in his hands, trying to understand how things had gone so far, how he could have allowed this to happen. Protesting the Hales’ help now would prove pointless, he hadn’t any choice in the matter.

“I can hear you thinking,” grunted Derek. He was stretched across the adjacent couch, book balanced in one hand.

“How awful for you,” Stiles scoffed, “The next time I’m attacked by a rapist, I’ll try to keep to myself, except that I did, and Boyd was the one that involved you people.” Once the words were out he was stunned to silence that he had said them aloud when such thoughts usually kept themselves angrily shut away.

Derek’s eyes shot to him, his brow arched and then he turned his attention back to his novel, “You’re welcome,” he said, laden with sarcasm.

There was no reason he saw to sit respectfully silent in front of the Hales, people who may have been aware of the status quo, but knew nothing of it. Stiles huffed, “You don’t even realize what this means, what they’re going to do to me. This isn’t a fucking game.”

“You said you would be dead in three years anyway,” Derek pointed out. But Derek had not been at the table when he had said that. He hadn’t wanted to believe that Thalia had asked him to dinner to mock him, even if he had thought that might be the reason. If they had told Derek what he had said, or about how drunk he had gotten or any number of things he might have done wrong, he might have been in more trouble than he had first thought.

“What do you want from me?” Stiles asked, gently pressing his knuckles to his eyes, wanting to rub them harder, as he usually did, but not willing to tempt the pain back.

“You know what,” Derek said.

“I don’t believe you.” And Derek shrugged because this was no concern of his. Baffled, Stiles watched him; thought of how he had dashed into the room at first, concern, perhaps even fear, scribbled on his face, how careful he had been, how delicately he’d handled Stiles as if he were a moth’s wings and easily torn. And now, how the distance between himself and everything around him had grown back in and Stiles could have been anyone or no one.

“Why did you help me?” Stiles tried, “You could’ve turned me away; should have if your family is trying to remain friendly with the Mayor.”

But Derek Hale was done speaking and glowered at the pages of his book and Stiles leaned back into the sofa and shut his eyes.

 

Stiles never dared playing on the Wall the way other children did. They would make a show of climbing it, sometimes reaching the top or throwing stones over it. Scott would join in when they were older because he was strong and cocksure. He once climbed it and leaped down to the other side after throwing down half a barrel of dark beer. Stiles might have joined him had he been younger and not yet learned how the Wall gave punishment. He begged Scott not to be a fool, but his quiet urging had been drowned out by the goading of the other boys. Halsey had even shoved him aside roughly and told him to be a man.

Scott had pretended to be attacked, thrown around sticks and rustled the leaf litter and cried out terribly and the others were pale even under cover of night. None of them spoke or moved, except for Stiles who had flung himself halfway up the side, racing, every part of him exposed and frightened and then Scott appeared, straddling the top in hysterics and crowing like a rooster.

Stiles had not spoken to him for a week afterward. Growing up in Last Rest, knowing what he did, Scott still had not been capable of understanding why Stiles was so upset, even after he had tried to explain it. His eyes had glazed shortly into Stiles’s lecture and finally, he gave up trying to impress on Scott what he would never comprehend.

 

Stiles was told that the doctor had to sew Scott’s eyes shut to give him the appearance of sleep in his casket and during the wake, he saw the thick black thread under his friend’s lids.

There was no way to be put to rest that gave him comfort. Burning away to nothing or being cored and stitched and trapped in the earth gave him blips of a nightmare even when he was awake still.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh, hello there, thanks for reading this far! 
> 
> that whittemore's a real cuntasaurus. 
> 
> finally some actual sterek, amiroight? i can never just jump in with that stuff. gotta pad it with 23482435435465 pages of exposition for no reason. my brain's like: how about a nice hurt/heal scene? and then Dark Brain swoops in all: sure but what if they both have horrible backstories and everything's on fire and i'm on fire also? split the difference and words appear. 
> 
> honestly, though, the inspiration for LR came from that part in american assassin where mitch is coming out of the water at the end. that scene looked really cold and stark despite the actual setting of it. and then my mind grapes started to ferment and here we are. oh, and don't you worry, there's a water scene in this specifically harkening back to that. which i don't think is much of a spoiler ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ 
> 
> the upload schedule is all over the place and for that i apologize. we thought the personal life explosions were done. apparently not. i'm literally getting this edited and posted while sitting on the toilet. so thanks a thousand times over for your patience. if anyone's bookmarking for later, don't worry man, i get it and this thing will finish - on the power of madonna i swear it. if you haven't checked out my other work, this is a swell time to take a look
> 
> laterz bb


	7. Chapter 7

Stiles awoke in a cold sweat that soaked through his sheets and his night clothes making him translucent in the moonlight. The bed the Hales had given him was like nothing he had ever slept in before and it was not what he had thought it might be.  The featherbed was too soft and had worked a crick into his back. 

Stiles paced the room a few times, glancing out the window and rubbing his shoulders to remind himself he was awake, his throat sour with climbing bile. He pulled down his bedding and made a pile of it on the floor near to the fireplace. His sleep returned fitfully and he was awake again just after sunrise, awakening not by the calling roosters, but by searing pain in his mouth. He bolted upright, sputtering, thinking a coal had stumbled from the hearth and passed his lips, but there was nothing lodged in his throat when he pawed at it, coughing. 

Strings of drool hung from his mouth, his breathing ragged, as he went to the pitcher and bowl stood near the far window. The drink of water only fueled the burn and he choked most of it back up. It was his tongue, his tongue was rotted, rotting from the inside; the Reverend had told him to go about his days as if he were mute and he had disobeyed and this was his punishment. He crumbled against the wall, all of the strength going from his legs and toppling the basin and pitcher. They smashed on the floor, pieces of porcelain skittering away, but the noise was damped down, happening far from him and he was trying to breathe, but even that, dragging air over his tongue, made him shiver and cry out. 

The door flew open and Laura and Peter stood there, each looking more irritated than the other. 

“What in God’s name,” grunted Peter, his crystal eyes taking in the room and Stiles huddled on the floor. “Have you any idea how expensive that was?”

“You are the one that was so intent on keeping him,” Laura groused as she strode across the floor to crouch by Stiles, “Whatever is the matter?”

“Can’t you tell?” asked Peter, rolling his eyes, though he made no movement to help. 

“ _No_ Peter,” Laura snarled, “ _And neither can you_.” Her voice was mothering when she said to Stiles, “Tell me what happened.” 

He could not. The pain was too much; so intense he felt it in his legs and arms. Grimacing, he pointed to his mouth and she pinched his chin between her thumb and forefinger so that he might open it, but how must it have looked? Greenish, leaking pus, riddled with maggots and Stiles eyes watered when he swallowed. 

“If you insist on being obstinate we should leave you here to your own devices,” Miss Laura informed him and Stiles’s mouth fell open. Already he was going mad with the excruciation of it. He needed Derek Hale, needed his magic or whatever he had done to ease the marks left on him by the Reverend. He garbled something to that effect, Laura ignored him as she squinted into his mouth. “Sores,” she concluded, “Peter, send for the doctor.”

Sores sounded as though the lesions were not as terrible as they felt, as if he had merely cut himself rather than the muscle putrefying of its own accord.

“Please,” Stiles tried around the bloat of tissue, “Mr. Hale – please.” _Anything but the doctor, dear God, anything but that._  


Peter raised his cunning brow, “You mean my nephew?” Stiles nodded, grateful that he didn’t have to try to say more. “Derek is out riding.” And something sank like a stone, drifting fast and heavy to the bottom of Stiles’s guts. 

“There is nothing he can do to help you,” Laura said, “You are in need of a doctor.” 

“I should think he will be along shortly,” continued Peter as if she had said nothing, “If he’s not pushing Mayor Hubbard’s steed to an early death on his way already.” 

“ _Peter_ ,” hissed Laura, head thrown over her shoulder at him for emphasis. Unbothered Peter cast about the room until spotting the makeshift bed Stiles had slept on. 

“What on earth have you against our things?” Peter implored, “Did these people rear you in a barn?” 

As Laura helped Stiles to stand and guided him to the bare mattress she sniffed, “You haven’t much room to talk, Uncle, given your own upbringing.” 

Peter’s mouth quirked, “You know, I never much cared for your father; I warned Tally against the perils of bedding a self-righteous wastrel.” 

When Doctor Hadley arrived he poked and prodded Stiles silently and under the watchful eyes of Peter Hale. It was of some comfort to have him there, if only because Stiles seemed to matter to him enough – likely to suit his own purposes – to preserve him. And Dr. Hadley was no friend to Stiles or his father. No matter what he was examining Stiles for, whether to bind an injury or check up on the state of his health, he always demanded Stiles doff his clothing, every stitch of it. 

For many years he had not known to question it until he learned that when Hadley was a boy, Fox Children that were not flung over the Wall when they were born, were not permitted to wear coverings. Clothes were the mark of higher being, a dividing line between humans and animals and human children were not born under the sign of the Fox. Hadley refused to see him if he did not undress, a point loudly argued by the doctor and his father, but there were no other doctors that could be reached without several days ride by horseback. Robert Martin's daughter was said to have taken up the profession, and Stiles had hoped briefly that is was her the Hales might conjure from the air, but she was almost always traveling.   


Stiles did not try to explain any of this to Peter, though he had gotten a funny look from the man when a servant informed them of Hadley’s arrival and Stiles immediately and painstakingly shrugged out of his night clothes. His room and the doctor’s hands were ice cold and his skin pinpricked with goose pimples. Hadley ordered him to lay back on the bed and spread his legs and while he had few reservations about nudity, the position was a vulnerable one, one that made his muscles harden with the wrongness of an exposed stomach. 

“As I said in the message,” Peter said sternly, coming off the wall he had been leaned against, “Stiles looks to have ulcers on his _tongue_.” 

“He needs to be fully examined before he is diagnosed,” Hadley spit, his wrinkled face’s lines deepening. 

“I think you’re more interested in humiliating him than treating him, _Doctor_ ,” Peter shot back, his bluntness registering on Hadley’s face as if he had struck him, “And I suggest before you lay another hand on him, that you consider your position in this town and how precarious that position is made based upon the actions taken in this room.” 

Stiles wanted only to sit up, or pull something over his stomach, but he did not move from the awful splayed arrangement Hadley had demanded he take while to two men glared at each other. Footfalls, quick and sharp reported from the hallway just before the door was being shouldered open and Stiles hinged upright at the noise to cover himself as Derek Hale came into the room. Rosy, embarrassed splotches broke out in a wreath across Stiles’s chest, stomach and face and his tongue igniting with pain when his jaw set. 

Derek’s stern brow crushed in on itself at the sight of him, visibly disgusted by the sight of his scarred body, the bruises and sickly undertones of his skin. He turned his murderous look on the doctor and then on Peter. 

“Dr. Hadley was just about to prescribe Stiles some silver nitrate for his tongue,” Peter mused, pleased by Derek’s anger. 

“Get on with it then,” Derek snapped and Hadley started to protest until Derek was in his space, stepping him against the wall. He said nothing threatening, not at all, and stood there, crowding the doctor until he gave in. Hadley muttered something about sending a message to the apothecary and Derek backed away from him. He yanked a blanket from the pile on the floor and roughly wrapped it around Stiles’s shoulders. Being jostled served to aggravate the sores and he winced, his body trying to curl in on itself to escape it. 

Despite how pathetic he felt, how ridiculous and childlike and ashamed, he begged Derek to make the pain stop – Jesus just make it stop – even if he could not speak. He didn’t care what the consequences of such witchcraft might be, if the Wall would see all of his skin flayed or send wolves to his door.

“ _Leave_ ,” Derek seethed, speaking to his uncle and doctor, but his eyes stuck to Stiles’s. 

“Nephew, think about what you’re doing,” advised Peter and Derek tore around and _growled_ at him. Stiles had heard the Hales’ deep-speech, the rumbling of their words when they were cross and he had known it was not a sound he could quite match himself, but this – this was a true _growl_. Peter rolled his eyes, it was becoming a familiar mannerism of his, and he gestured Hadley out of the room. 

Maybe the price of feeling no pain was to be devoured by whatever sort of demon Derek Hale was. 

It was too late to run and had been for some time. 

Derek came back to him, dropped to one knee. Stiles flinched away when he brought a hand up to his face, earning him an annoyed huff. Derek’s hand cupped his jaw, his long, capable fingers going behind his ear. 

“Close your eyes,” Derek commanded and he did and as soon as he saw darkness, the pain in his mouth began to slide away. He was leaning into Derek’s palm before he knew better of it, the hand clasping his blanket closed dropping to his lap and his covering skated off him as well. Frosty air made his bare shoulders shiver, but he was only slightly aware of it. Derek’s fingers hotly scorched his skin, made his chest heave. Sweat beaded on his forehead and on his collarbone, rolled in fat droplets down his sternum. 

Swirls of color streaked the inside of his mind, made him floaty, distanced and he hadn’t the wherewithal to stop himself laughing. He did not feel Derek’s hand leave him, or he did, but at an immense delay. His eyes peeked open and Derek was staring at him and it made his giggles stretch into proper laughter, such that it hurt his stomach.

“W-what?” he sputtered. 

“You’re smiling,” Derek said gravely, a concept that must have been foreign to someone as taciturn as he was and Stiles doubled over with an unattractive snort. 

Peter came through the door a moment later, his brow arched and demanded, “Derek Hale what in sweet Hell have you done to him?”

“He was in pain,” Derek stammered, still watching Stiles as if he had broken him somehow and maybe he had. 

“Ulcers from _stress_ ,” Peter fumed, “not a _shattered_ _spine_.” Mr. Hale closed the door and stepped quickly to the bed, his hands going to each of Stiles’s bouncing shoulders, “Can you hear me?”

Stiles tried to nod and failed and his cheeks were sore from wearing such a mad grin. Peter, too, smiled wryly. “Well, you aren’t in any pain now,” he sighed, “can’t feel a thing, can you?” He couldn’t, not even his own flesh and bones. “Alright, princess, lay back and try to sleep. It’ll wear off in a few hours.” He herded Stiles’s to the middle of the bed and together he and Derek brought up the rest of sheets from the floor to cover him with. 

As they left Peter hissed to his nephew, “ _You_ can explain this to Thalia. We’ll be _extremely_ fortunate if this little stunt just now did not cook his brains into jam.” 

Stiles slept as if he been wide awake all of his life. Peaceful lulling dreams rocked him gently, a boat carrying him downstream. He drifted in and out of it for an eternity and was not bothered by the prospect of his work going undone or what might be crouching in wait when he did finally stir. 

A few times when he rose into half-sleep he heard a voice, reading bits of stories he had heard before. Sometimes there were fingers carding through his hair the way John used to do before putting him down for bed. When the hand withdrew, he mumbled for his father, or dreamed that he had. 

When Stiles was no more than six, he saw what lay beyond the Wall. Just passed the Barlow farm, there was a chink in the Wall where the mortar in the stacked cobbles had come away. He had peered through it, into dense green and there were things running through the brush, low and fast and smelling heady. They could have been anything, any sort of demons like the monsters in the stories and he should have been more afraid than he was. They darted away so quickly he caught only a glimpse of their rushing shadows and he’d thought they were skitty, like the deer in the fields at dusk; interested in only keeping away. 

He didn’t understand why They bothered with traitors to the Wall, why the ropes were said to come back mangled and blood stained. If they were animals like any other, did the offering plate at each Giving not serve to keep them attracted to the village? Or was the harvest meant for something else, something reaching and dark and vast as the Wood?

When he truly came back to the world, the fire was sparkling and the windows dim. A calloused hand gripped his own and his father was beaming at him. Stiles pushed himself to sit up, questions burgeoning on his lips, until he recalled where he was. 

Seeing the line of his eye his father said, “Not bad, is it?” hand sweeping across the wicker wheelchair he sat it. “I tried to tell Mrs. Hale that I could get on without it, but there doesn’t seem to be a way of telling that woman no.” 

Stiles shook his head in agreement, smiling small. 

“Her boy’s been here since before I arrived,” John whispered, jerking his head to the left to where Derek Hale was slumped in the rocking chair in the corner, breathing even with sleep. 

Every muscle constricted at seeing him there, looking angry with all of Creation even while he slept. Stiles remembered the healing trick, how it had made him not himself, stolen away control over his body and recoiled. John squeezed his hand, bringing back his focus. 

“Are they good people?” his father asked hopefully and Stiles could not tell him he was not sure. From what his father saw, they were protecting his son, even knowing what he was and at the risk of putting them at odds with Last Rest. John would not live forever, had said as much in his darker moments, addled with drink, and Stiles would be alone without his father’s authority to guard him. John wanted people for him or like him and the Hales were more than he could have hoped for; a prayer answered after years since his son’s birth spent on his knees. 

John had not seen their thinly concealed secrets, had not seen the way Peter Hale looked at Stiles; calculating as an owl listening for mice. 

“I think so,” Stiles said regardless. 

John smiled and let out a breath of relief, “Mrs. Hale says she intends to employ you for the term of their stay. She said she’s been impressed with your fortitude.” 

Stiles nodded grimly. He had thought as much; if the Hales wished to keep him close to them to gain his favor it was natural to offer him a position and they all knew, with the exception of his father, that he had very little choice in the matter. He was still a bird in a cage; the cage may change, may be more gilded and lovely, but he was not free, not really. 

He was told he had slept for two days and that Thalia had taken the liberty of treating the sores speckling his tongue while he slumbered. When she offered the job of tailor to him properly she decided on four dollars a week for payment, an obscene amount of money that he could not fathom. He was to keep the room they had given him initially and she asked that he join them for dinners and this was the only point he fought her on. 

“I’m the help, Mrs. Hale,” he had said, “It’s not right.” Eating supper with the family he served would incur jealousies from the rest of her staff, whether she realized it or not and he assumed her servants no better than Hubbard’s. He would have enough messes to clean as it was. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IT LIVES.
> 
> Ok, so, listen - or read? - I have gotten so many encouraging comments and messages over the last two months that my fucking soul is bloated with happy gas. Seriously, I haven't been able to respond to all of you, and I sincerely apologize for that, but I have read and internalized all of the good vibes and shoved them in the face of my SO who patiently puts up with my gushy tears/fattening pride. You are all my MIRACLES. 
> 
> ahem.
> 
> That was weird. I think I just blacked out for a second. Mother didn't raise her homunculus to acknowledge or communicate their feelings. 
> 
> So that was a chapter. Peter Hale being all protective and direct and stuff does things for me. LR is really his time to shine; haven't done him much justice in the other drabbles. 
> 
> This is unrelated (sorta) but I don't have friends that care about shit I care about, thems the perils of adult relationships I suppose. But like have you guys fucking seen [Wuffen's](http://wuffen.tumblr.com/) stuff? I just, you probably have and I've been following for years, but just. Damn. Really into that shit lately. So good. So yes. 
> 
> As usual the upload sched is floppy? The next one should be soon. Hopefully I'll have my machine back from the shop. If you know what I mean. That's not a euphemism. It's literally the reason I can edit and re-draft any faster. 
> 
> Peace *slaps camera off desk*  
> *picks camera back up*  
> *puts camera on desk*  
> *this isn't youtube*


	8. Chapter 8

The Hales were far crueler to their clothes than even Miss Henrietta. Lahey, the young man that had waited on him, refilling his wine and taking his plates the last time he had been the Hale’s guest, ferried to him mountains of pieces: gowns, trousers, socks, shirts, and so on, each day. And there was not a single offender among them, rather all five of them were culpable. Stiles learned the ways they destroyed their clothes before he learned to identify the garments by whom they belonged to. 

Thalia and Cora broke seams on gloves and trampled hems as if they forgot to pick up their skirts as they walked and Laura thrice cracked the boning of her corsets. Peter would occasionally lose buttons on his shirts and jackets and his scarf looked to have a nasty run it with a pair of shears. 

But Derek Hale was the worst of them. 

Stiles understood his station, understood what Mrs. Hale was showering payment down on him to do, and now he did not think his compensation so indecent, but there was a point at which he could no longer bend. By the end of his first week, pins stuck in his mouth, his owly sewing spectacles hanging from nose, his frustration got the better of him. He snatched up the latest of Mr. Hale’s _victims_ – the damage of which was so severe he had never seen its ilk – and stormed out into the hall. 

He pounded on Derek’s door a bit harder than was necessary, but it felt good. When it swung open Stiles thrust out the now rag, for what else could he possibly turn it into, and hissed, “This is _unacceptable_.” 

Derek’s eyes divided between the ribbons of cotton and Stiles, but he said nothing. 

“Have you any idea the cost of this shirt?” Stiles went on, hellbent on making an example he hoped the entire household could hear. “Have you even the slightest bit of respect for the time that went into this? Into tailoring it? And now it’s worthless. I cannot mend things that you yourself have no love for. What would be the point? _Stop_ wasting my time, you’re not a _child_.” 

He may have pushed too far with the last but could not reign in the cascade of words once they began falling. If he had had more sense he would have walked off his anger in the garden or started on a less infuriating project. 

Derek leaned on the doorframe, arms crossed and Stiles realized suddenly he was not wearing any sort of shirt. His body was the only one that matched the eerie strength of his family. He was broad from shoulder to shoulder and built like a cart-horse, all sinew peppered with coarse dark hair. Stiles swallow hard, hard enough to swallow his own tongue, and was glad of the kerchief tied to his brow for mopping up the abrupt spring of perspiration. 

“You’re a tailor,” Derek said to him, smirking subtly. 

Regaining himself, Stiles snapped, “I’m a tailor, not a _resurrectionist_.” 

“Yelling at your employer is not very professional of you.” 

Stiles leveled a finger at him, “ _You_ are not my employer. Your mother is. And if I am forced to go to her over this _I will_.” 

Derek’s brows rose to his hair line at the threat. “You’re going to tattle?”

Stiles chuckled dryly, “I understand that I am some sort of pet to you people. I don’t pry into your lives, I don’t ask questions you wouldn’t want anyone asking, and I _could_ ,” and he let that sink in for a moment, “All I want is to be able to do my work and you are keeping me even from that, _Mr. Hale_.” 

Fairly certain he had gotten his point across, Stiles turned on his heel and stomped back to his room. 

Stiles planted his hands on his knees to catch his breath as it blew erratically away from him in steamy clouds. The constant stream of garments kept him too busy to make the long walk to his father’s house most days, but he was able to get away from his stuffy little room occasionally to go strolling or, in this case, running along the edges of the Hubbard’s property. It was suffocating to be closed up in the manor all day and he missed the snow crunching under foot and the sharp, clear air of the outdoors. 

It was too late in winter to go looking through the woods for mushrooms or strawberries, so he made due wandering and turning over rocks to see what might be hiding under them. 

The black dog made itself visible some days, like this one, though Stiles could feel that it was always near, even if it veiled itself in the pines. They ran together, the dog far out pacing him each time he darted and when it got too far ahead he would change direction suddenly until it came bounding back, kicking up drifts in its wake, it’s midnight fur caked in white clumps. 

Stiles climbed a stand of boulders, panting and sucked in breath, though it stung, and let loose a crow like Scott had that night perched on the Wall. In the distance, the dog’s ears perked and it jumped up in a spray of powder and let out a yip that cut starkly across the land. 

He thought sometimes of bringing scraps with him to try luring the beast to him, but it didn't seem right. Whether it was born to the forest or fled from a house, it was wild now and Stiles could not bring himself to take that away from it. They belonged together out here in the boundless infinite; untied to each other but choosing to run and leap and play. 

Stiles let his eyes fall closed and he pulled the scent of the winter woods into himself. 

Half way up the bowling green of the Manor, tolling bells began to blare out. Stiles turned to the sound, toward the town and he could just make out the belfry, its brass bells rocking to and fro, jarring the winter’s silence. He had heard the chime of warning bells once before and his blood ran blue and frigid. He had heard them the last time an offering was scant, when the harvest had been sparse from blight taking half the crops. He had filled the cellar with his wailing, his parents holding them between them, shielding him from the doors and his mother cooing to him, pleading with him to be silent. 

_Shh, my little mischief, my son, please, be still for Mama, please, be still._

Had he thought retribution would not come? The last time the Wall was breached, it was sick fate that had destroyed the offerings and Last Rest had scraped by to summer living on rations and losing many elders and children to illness or frost. But this was a worse; the livestock and crop had been in good health and plentiful under the serenity of the Doe. Whatever was salvageable was left to the Wood, but it would have been smashed, an insult and the They were coming over the Wall. 

_Mama loves you._

If he were not a coward he would throw himself to the Reapers and his blood might appease Them; it was because of him the Fox was stronger with the turn of each cycle. But Stiles _was_ a coward, too selfish to die that way, torn in half and devoured. He started moving, jerkily to the house, stumbling in the snow. He didn’t know where the cellar was and his heart choked and he threw himself at the main doors only to bounce off of them. He frantically jiggled the handle, but they were already locked, locked even though whoever had done it must have seen him just down the slope. 

He sprinted around the side of the house and was met with another locked door and his hands were in his hair, his blood roaring and he kicked the jamb with a snarl. Panic crept through his muscles and he willed it away; being consumed by fear would only deliver him faster to Hell. He needed to hide himself away some place, any place. 

The shed. 

Every sense he had screamed at him, thrashed against him, beseeching him to find anywhere else, not there, not that small, dark place. He dashed to it, got ahold of the handle and the world bowed and there was only the ramshackle door, bleached under years of sun, bleached white as a bone. 

_Close your eyes._

He scrunched shut his eyes and brought the door in behind him. There were cold iron fittings and bolts and gardening tools swinging from racks or under his hands and cobwebs sticking his hair, but he kept his eyes from looking even though he desperately wanted to watch Death as it stalked him. He stood there in the stillness, every part of him clenched, fighting for control over his racing mind; the broom cupboard, musty and close, rocks banging off it sides and creeping, slithering, crawling things under his clothes. 

His hands when to his belly, clutching it, guarding it, keeping it from sending up bile. 

Steps in the snow, coming fast, reckless. His own footprints would be there, leading here, leading to this fucking shed. The door creaked, its hinges too rusted and frozen to behave, and refusing to open and Stiles’s hands clapped over his ears. The wraith on the other side snarled and the door flew off the shed with a booming rend that shook the equipment hung on its walls, some of it clattering down around Stiles’s feet. 

Stiles couldn’t utter a sound when it grabbed him and spun him around – “Stiles!”

A gasp shook out of him to find Derek there, tugging his hand, pulling him out from the shed. Derek tucked him to his side and they ran. 

“It’s locked,” Stiles wheezed when they came to the side door. Derek tried the handle anyway, but it did not budge. He growled again, as he had before, a low dangerous sound, his eyes flitting, hunting for another way. He pushed Stiles back behind him and kicked the handle with enough force to shatter the panes. The door swung listlessly inward and they were through it. 

“We can’t leave it like that!” Stiles cried.

“It won’t matter,” Derek barked back. He hauled Stiles up the grand staircase rather than along the ground floor in search on the cellar door. Stiles tried to protest, to make him stop and go back, but Derek ignored him and they were through to his family’s rooms. Stiles did not have time to make sense of what he saw there. The Hales were not hunkered down in the cellar with the Mayor as they should have been, but in the sitting room, with all furniture shoved to the walls and hearth blazing high. 

“Stiles, darling, thank God,” Thalia said, pulling him into her bosom.

“What’s happening?” Stiles asked dumbly. 

“Are you hurt?” she demanded, checking him over and lifting his chin. 

“He’s fine,” Derek spat and took Stiles from her, positioning him behind the semi-circle the Hales had formed and Stiles tore away from him. 

“ _Stop dragging me like a child,”_ came out of him all vinegar and fear, “What are you all doing?! We need to get below ground!”

“We’re safer up here,” Thalia assured him.

“That is, of course, a relative term,” Peter tacked on and his sister cut a glare over at him. 

“Stiles, stay behind my son,” said Thalia, urging him on with smoky, wide eyes. They were all lunatics, all of them, but what stopped Stiles fleeing back down the stairs, was the magic Derek had taken away all of his pain with. He could not trust in them, but he could trust in that, that there was more under their skin than bone. Derek had ripped apart the shed and broke in a door without an ounce of his energy spent and he was looking at Stiles like he was made of steel and determination and – and Stiles couldn’t catch his breath. 

He allowed Derek to stand in front of him. He wore only an undershirt, one with a rip in the shoulder and briars clinging to it and through the thin linen was a black threefold spiral, an ink mark between his shoulder blades. Stiles held back his hand from touching it, from touching Derek’s arms or the dimples of his lower back. All of the Hales cramped into a corner like this, it worked a weirdness into the space; one that amplified the need to run his hands over anything within reach, to smell and taste and he – 

Derek’s hand reached back and took his. The man was looking at him, over one shoulder, not asking or telling; existing. A BANG echoed off the walls and made the floor quake. Stiles twined his fingers into Derek Hale’s and the house was thrown apart around them. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my god. what a month. i'm so tired. 
> 
> but i'm here! we're chipping away at this monster together no matter how slowly. so thank you so so much for sticking with me. i've got a fabulous book in the works with the help of my extremely patient family which has been a contributing factor to LR taking so long to post. 
> 
> if you enjoy my fanfic please spread it around, infect your friends with the STD of reading!
> 
> and please by all means slap a comment on here or message me on tumblr, whatever floats your goat, i'm always around for feedback or advice. 
> 
> man you guys brighten my days. i mean it.
> 
> may your winter months be filled with calories and soft blankets!


	9. Chapter 9

In school, they were taught that the Ancestors had built the Wall, some of the first people after the Awakening. There had been lesions in the earth, spilling fire and ash that covered Creation and nearly all were lost. When the Earth began to grow again, and the air was sweet, the Ancestors came here to the valley that now harbored Last Rest and Hollow Tree and Fever Hill and Two Oaks. The four towns left at the edge of what was known. 

They built the Wall from sea to sea and many died during its construction. It held out the Wood and those born from it. There may have been thousands of kinds of creatures dwelling there and they were seen from time to time and some tried to catalogue them, but they rarely came close enough for study. 

Their teacher had a large roll of parchment that she hung from the chalk board, faded and yellowed. The creatures of the Wood were solitary, of no consequence to any that lived well, minded their chores and were Godly. On the teacher’s parchment was the only darkness that ever left the trees to torment mortals or to exact retribution on a spoiled Offering. They could go generations with being seen; until the year of the ravishing blight Stiles’s grandmother was the only one left alive to have seen one and she had been a child at the time. 

Before she died, she would tell stories to Stiles warning against their coming, that a splash of lamb’s blood across the door would keep them away or a sprinkle of holy water. Her story would change and faded the more years passed her by. Even if the details were lost to her, she would still wake in the night crying out that the Harvestmen were coming for her. 

“Don’t look them in the eye,” Peter muttered, falling to one knee. Each of them did, tightly packed together, Derek bringing Stiles down with him and Stiles forced his gaze to the wine-red carpeting. His shocking heart rate gagged his lungs, tunneled his vision. His grandmother’s gnarled hands, hands like tree roots, were in his mind, folded over one another, her voice like a clatter of wood and the teacher’s parchment, the charcoal-smear drawing the Harvestman. 

Derek’s hand tightened on his.

Screams faintly called out from the bottom floor and Stiles eyes shut against the thing on the stairs, coming into the room, bellowing breath. The temperature, even so close to Derek, to Cora and Peter and the fire, careened and there was frost in the air, touching and settling on his skin and in his hair. 

The Harvestman scraped about the room on what sounded like more than two legs, more than four. It felled furniture and smashed glass, anything unfortunate enough to be in its path was destroyed until it was hovering above them. 

Tears skated down Stiles’s nose, but he was quiet, choking himself to hold down a scream. Were they invisible to it? Were the Hales so powerful that they could conceal themselves from this evil? Before he could comfort himself with the notion, no matter how childish, something like twigs was fondling his hair and rancid, freezing breath poured down. The spiders in the broom cupboard, skittering up his pant leg, under his shirt, biting and crawling with nowhere to go. 

One of the thin feelers caressed his cheek and he could not hold it in, could not stand it another second. He opened his mouth to scream, lurching back, but not a sound made it from him because Derek was there, hand slapped over his mouth, muffling the scream. Derek held him fast against him, his other arm pinning Stiles’s limbs to his sides and Peter’s back was ahead of him though his hadn’t seen him move. 

Derek’s lips were at his ear whispering and shouting all at once, “ _Don't!_ _”_ Peter was mumbling something, maybe another language, but it was quick and repeating like a chant or what the Lost Language of the Good Book might have sounded like. Cora had shuffled to their side, her arm joining her brother’s across Stiles’s middle and Thalia as well, and Laura, murmured along with her uncle. 

_Stiles is in his parents’ cellar again. They are close, his father uttering strangled sounds and his hold on_ _Stiles’s_ _arm too tight. His mother is weeping, tears falling into his hair and muttering, whispering to him and he cannot stop himself crying because he is too small to understand this sort of fear._

The Harvestman was hideous.

Derek’s nose nudged into his throat, huffing and rubbing and blowing warm breath across his scalp. He told Stiles under that breath that he was safe, that he was an innocent and the Harvestmen did not collect innocents. 

The creature left and the coldness it brought, left with it. For a long while, none of them moved away, their collective ragged breathing cacophonous. Peter fell back onto his rear from the crouch he had been tucked in and rubbed his face and Stiles had never seen him so out of sorts. Thalia crawled to her brother and put her arm around his shoulders and they leaned into each other, their heads pressed.

Derek released his hold of Stiles’s mouth and held him to his chest, forehead bent on Stiles’s shoulder. But Stiles could not bring himself to relief, no, he could not and he shouted, “ _Why?!_ ” and ripped against Derek’s clasped arms, screaming the word again and he was still crying, crying openly. He had seen a man _torn in half_ on the road to his house the last time They had come; torn apart! Guts and red and moony eyes and John had tried to sweep him up before he saw it, but he had and it was in his dreams and sometimes that man was Scott or himself. He had been held down beneath the same monster that had killed that man and it had passed him over, even after disobeying the Hales, and he knew there were bodies in the streets of Last Rest that had been judged the way he should have been. 

Thalia was before him, cupping his face, “Stiles, sweetheart, you are safe.”

He scrambled to his feet and to the middle of the room staring out at the landing, the doors hanging from hinges and ruined chandelier below. And Fox was snick, snicking in the hall, pressing to the walls as it surveyed the destruction and the bloody foot prints the creatures had left. 

“Why!” Stiles screamed at them, at Fox and the Hales and the Harvestmen. He was no innocent; he was crueler than the rest, a devil in human clothes that murdered his own mother, his best friend and yet he _lived_.

“Stiles, please, calm down, you are safe,” pleaded Thalia. 

“He thinks it should have taken him,” came Peter’s smoldering voice, and he rose from the floor. He did not come too close, though he did pad forward. “Stiles,” he said, “You are not what they have told you, you are-,”

“ _Peter_ ,” Thalia warned. 

He turned his annoyed disbelief on his sister and said, “It is cruel what they’ve done to him Thalia and it is cruel that you should hide it from him this long.” 

“Shut _up_!” Stiles cried, not now, he could not swallow being spoken about this way, like he were a dog to them, not again, “I am right _fucking_ here!” The startle wedged into Peter’s face was worth his outburst. “Tell me why It did not take me; why didn’t It take _any of you_? You knew they were coming, you knew how to protect yourselves and you helped _no one_ in this house! If They discovered the cellar then all inside are _dead_ and that blood is on _your hands!”_

“The Harvestmen don’t harm innocents,” Cora piped up out of what looked to be more irritation than empathy. 

Stiles took a step and jammed a finger at himself, “ _I am not innocent. I_ killed _my mother. I killed Scott McCall. I let a married_ _man_ _fuck me_ _. I should be a corpse in the field_.” 

“You base your sense of right and wrong off of the constructs of men,” Peter said coolly. He made a vague gesture with his hands and said, “They have forgotten the Land. But _you_ – you can hear the Fox, can’t you?” 

And Stiles stared at him, hemorrhaging air. 

“I thought so,” Peter said, smugness settling on him, “It speaks to you; you can see it from the corner of your eye sometimes. It’s here, now, even as we speak, is it not?”

He did not want to give in to Peter’s nonchalance. The way he spoke of Fox, like a tangible thing and yet, Fox was there, behind Stiles, bristled.

“You what?” mused Peter, “Thought you had imagined it? Thought it was your anger come to bare? Why do you think you feel strangely in a house, Stiles? You were wilder as a child, weren’t you, before they beat it out of you? You are so certain the Harvestman should have taken you and if you lived by these people’s rules, you would have tried to give yourself to Them, but you went to ground instead. You would chew through your own leg to escape a cage, cut a man’s throat, tell me I am wrong.” 

“I _wouldn’t_ ,” Stiles croaked, chin trembling. 

“You _would_ ,” challenged Peter, coming closer, “Those scars on your knuckles are not a product of labor; they caged you once, maybe more than once, and you broke your own fingers trying to get away.” 

Stiles hands balled into fists, “I was a _child_ ,” he insisted, but Peter simply shook his head. 

“No, a _child_ gives up, sits down, cries for mother but not you.”

“ _E_ _nough_ ,” growled Derek. He had risen without Stiles seeing and he was force of anger, his head tipped down in aggression at his uncle. 

“Oh, please,” sighed Peter, “If I am upsetting him, he should be upset. These _people_ did this to him and he should be overcome with anger. Who are they? Greedy little humans quibbling over their piety?”

“Stop pretending this is about what’s best for him,” spat Laura, standing in a whirl of her skirts. 

“Child, if you for one moment would arrest your insatiable high-mindedness you might come to realize that what is best for this family might also be best for Stiles,” Peter retorted. By the time Peter turned back to Stiles, perhaps ready to lay down more of his arrogance, Stiles was already gone, running through the house, through the snow as fast as his legs could carry him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WHAAAT
> 
> hello sweetpeas. 
> 
> please enjoy this double update :D
> 
> This scene works better split up i think, i dunno, you tell me. 
> 
> spoopy harvestmen just in time for the spoopiest month of all.


	10. Chapter 10

He ran and ran through the snowy dervishes. There was blood in the snow, here and there, bodies splayed out with twisted broken limbs at the corners of his vision but he pushed on, refusing to look. Fog and smoke obscured the trampled back-roads. Something was burning and horses were braying, screaming so loud Stiles‘s ears shudder. 

He slipped on the ice outside his father's garden gate and scraped his chin in his madness to right himself and get to the door. 

“DAD!” he yelled, wild eyes tearing apart the empty house. There hadn’t been any wheel tracks in the snow; John hadn’t made it to the storm doors set to the side of the house. 

“Stiles?” came a tentative reply, Melissa’s, not his fathers and then -- 

“We’re here!” John cried out and Stiles shoved through the bedroom door to find them crouched together in the far corner, a blanket wrapped around his father‘s shoulders against the wintery drop that followed the Harvestmen through Last Rest.  Stiles fell into his father’s arms, tears springing again from his eyes and John kissed his hair and held him fast. 

“Stiles, Stiles,” his father murmured tightly, sweeping hair from his forehead, “Stiles, you can’t stay here.” His voice was tight, strangled, terrified. “You have to go, they can’t  -- they can’t find you here.” 

“You have to run,” Melissa told him soberly, “they’ll hang you for this.”

John took his son’s face in both hands, “We will be fine, but you have to get away from here, do you understand?”

“Please, dad, please don’t-,” but he didn’t know what he was begging for, only that he couldn’t move, was too petrified to stand.

John shook him hard, “I love you, I love you son, but I can’t watch you hang, I can’t do that, RUN!”

He and Melissa pushed Stiles away, pushed him to stand and Stiles stood there no longer a young man but a child, tears and snot streaking his face and freezing as they fell. His father’s shattered expression begged silently for him to go when he couldn’t find the words to demand it. 

So, Stiles backed away and sprinted from the house and back into the snowy  fields.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

With no coat, he put shaking arms around himself as he sat on a log. 

He could spare his father watching his corpse swing if he froze to death and the thought made Fox chortle. Maybe It thought he would never allow himself to pass that way, he was too cowardly, and if only to prove It wrong he considered doing just that. They said dying in the cold was like falling asleep and this was the sort of death that did not frighten him as much as burial or a pyre. He could grow icy and blue and his thoughts would lose Peter Hale and Fox and the stresses that had burnt holes in his tongue. 

A great coat, its wool dyed ebony and smelling sweetly of peppermint dropped over his shoulders and the log creaked when Derek Hale perched beside him. The winter had sunk so far into his marrow that he did not scare at Hale’s sudden appearance. 

“L-leave me-e al-one,” Stiles stammered, but his hands betrayed him, working without him to pull the coat tighter around his body. In the winter sun, steam lifted off of Derek’s arms and chest and Stiles did not want to know how he could be so warm it altered the air around him. He did not want to know how he could relieve pain or why the Reaper had passed over them all. 

“We’re leaving,” Derek said to him, eyes ensnared elsewhere in the barren tangle of trunks and vines.

Stiles snorted miserably, unable to understand or care why Derek was telling him this. 

“You are coming with us.”

“N-no I’m not.” 

Derek peered down at him, “Hate me,” he said, eyes going into Stiles as if he was not looking at any part of him outwardly visible, “but you’re coming with us.”

“Did you h-hear a word of wh-at I said?” Stiles hissed, “I’ve murdered two peo-ple; I’m – I’m,” _I’m a Fox slut._     


“Did you hear anything Peter said?” Derek countered, “Whatever you did,” he said blandly, casting eyes on the churned-up snow, “you haven’t told us all of it and you wouldn’t have said what you did if you weren’t so biased against yourself.” 

The cold was turning the scars on his hands plum colored and he hated them. 

“I can take it away,” Derek muttered, the unspoken _take away your pain_ louder than what came from his mouth. Stiles considered it and being so mindless was its own sort of prison, but he knew he would never leave Last Rest of his own accord. He could never abandon his father here, or his mother. And for once, Fox did not mock him. It may have been quietly curled up some place far away and hidden if only to ensure he made the right choice and went to ground as Mr. Hale had said. 

“I don’t wa-nt to fff-eel anything,” Stiles told him and Derek nodded. He let his eyes drift closed and Derek’s palm pressed to his cheek and snakes of soreness and aching and fear slithered away from him, and he melted into Derek’s side and Derek chuffed into his hair. 

He was aware of himself, of the smears of movement, being dressed warmly and helped discreetly to a waiting coach. No matter where he was or who he was with he smelled smoke. It could have been a dream and he convinced himself it was because he would never do these things. But that was a lie too. When it mattered, Fox always won out and preserved him. 

He could not know what he would have done without Its influence. Died un-remarkably perhaps from wounds or by musket shot. He did die, he thought, a part of him went no further than the border of his town and stood under the last tree at the edge of Barlow farm watching the horses pass, snow falling all around. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey cuties
> 
> double update! bc i got a bunch of shit done yesterday and also because you've all been quite spectacularly patient. I'm aiming to complete LR by the end of January so strap the fuck in. the next few updates will be multiple chapters and slightly sporadic. my disoragnization has come full circle to organization and no one can convince me otherwise. 
> 
> In light of the whatever the fuck tumblr is doing to itself I've stopped procrastinating and launched an IG (@bandaransketch) and twitter (@bandaranART) for my work. Been meaning to for a while, but as anyone who reads these blurbs knows, its been a chaotic year. I've moved three fucking times in this year of our lord 2018. I want to nap for a thousand years. 
> 
> and hey if you decide to follow me on either platform feel free to DM me for sketch requests (they will be paper/pencil because my Big Contooter is still in a box ad so is my wacom) because you deserve a fun doodle in these trying times my lemon sweets. 
> 
> i think that's it for now. i always feel like i'm forgetting something when i'm writing these dumb fucking notes.
> 
> putting eyeliner on my upper waterline has changed my life?? i'm shook?
> 
> we all on the same page? cool. B)


	11. Chapter 11

“Good morning!” came a shrill greeting and Stiles cracked open his lids and was blinded by the searing light of the winter sun. He squinted out the carriage window to find that it was at a stop and he the only one left in the cabin. Cora Hale was leaned on the sill, offering him a tin cup of coffee, billowing steam and losing heat quickly. He took it from her, careful not to spill any, and let it bring some life back into fingers that were more icicles than fingers. 

“What day is it?” he croaked. 

“Today. You’ve been asleep since yesterday.” She was no longer draped in pretty clothes or pearls. Her finery was traded for practical garments, leather and fur lined snow clothes, the like of a true trapper with all of her hair bundled up in a rabbit pelt hat. Stiles found himself wearing something similar, his knees covered by a bear skin. 

Sipping his coffee, bitter and unsweetened, he asked, “Where?”

“Couldn’t say,” Cora shrugged, “Some place on the road. Mr. Boyd is our navigator.” 

“Mayor Hubbard’s housekeeper?” he implored, fretting over how many others the Hales had abducted without his knowing. 

“Vernon was filling in on the Mayor’s staff and his wife too,” her head cocked to one side, “Did you not think it odd Mr. Boyd should deliver you to our rooms rather than to the Mayor’s office?” 

“I wasn’t thinking anything,” he said, and freed a hand to knuckle his eye. 

“No, I suppose you were not,” she huffed and it was clear that she considered his thoughtlessness more general than situational. “Mother sent me to fetch you for breakfast. We’ve sausages and pork belly frying and some cheese and bread as well.” And with that she danced away from the coach, humming a skipping tune. 

Stiles found his legs unsure under him, still wobbly from the torpor of Derek Hale’s magic. On the other side of the snow packed road a fire was roaring and Lahey and Boyd and a blond woman stood with the Hales around it, plates in hands. Thalia’s eyes brightened when she saw him. She, like her daughter, wore thick winter trousers and a coat, her raven locks woven into a neat plait. 

“How are you feeling?” she asked, when he had joined their circle. 

“Fine,” he said, because he had no other answer, true or not. Until Derek was stomping back to the encampment, Stiles had not noticed his absence. Clumps of snow were matted to him and stuck in his beard; so chilled was the land that not even his high temperature was able to melt it. He threw down an armful of logs and sticks, easily a hundred pounds worth like it were a handful of straw to him. Lahey handed him a wafting cup and – Stiles averted his gaze as they rubbed their cheeks together like two friendly barn cats. 

Eyeing him Thalia said, “Forgive them, our family has some unique quirks.” 

All eyes were on him, Peter, smirking as seemed his default expression, and Cora sniggering with Laura and Derek – Stiles could not guess the nature of his thoughts and doubted anyone could if he did not want them to. Stiles asked, “Is it common in Fever Hill?” 

A spurt of Cora’s laughter made him flush. 

“No,” Thalia said warmly, “Just in our family.” 

He drank some coffee, scalding though it was, just to give himself something to do while being ridiculed for a reason that was annoyingly hidden from him. 

“Where are your manners, _brother mine_?” chided Cora, “Stiles is our guest.” Derek snorted at her, a note of warning echoed in the baritone of it. 

“Ignore my children,” Thalia said, “They are all brutes. We are expected to act a certain way when traveling on business and when that business is done…,” she waved at Cora and her out-stuck tongue.

“You didn’t decide against your outpost because of – what happened?”

She swapped a glance with Peter, before saying, “Yes and no. We have our values, as I told the Mayor, and those values are strongly opposed to your treatment in Last Rest. If not you, who would they blame next for their plight? An outsider trading company perhaps? Or the family operating it? Mayor Hubbard liked the idea of new industry, but if there was public outcry against it? Let us say that I had very little faith that he would rise to the challenge of protecting our assets, let alone our wellbeing.” 

“And… what will happen to me?” he asked, hating the uncertainty, the dependence, in his voice. 

“Whatever you desire,” she told him placidly, “You may stay with us, we’ve more than enough space for you or you may leave us in the next town if you wish. Although, I would be sad to see you go and… I know I would not be alone in that sadness.” 

Stiles shook his head to clear the jumble of thoughts and asked, “Why don’t you care what I am?” 

“I care _immensely_ what you are,” she said, “immensely, Stiles. If you mean, why don’t I hate you for it? That is because I know what it is to be chastised for something that is totally out of my control. You are not unlucky because of when you were born, you are unlucky to have been born amongst such closed-mindedness. And you are free of that now. So, try to see yourself as I do while you are with us. You are different and clever and important.” 

Thalia leaned into his space and rubbed her cheek to his, nuzzling her nose behind his ear and he was stiff, but the sensation was not unpleasant. She whispered to him, “You are a Hale, if you want to be one.” 

He nodded but had no answer for her or for himself. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *✭˚･ﾟ✧*･ﾟ* You've made it so far! thanks for reading! here's some stars for you hot stuff ｡･:*:･ﾟ★,
> 
> comments, feedback welcome as always ･:*:･ﾟ☆


	12. Chapter 12

The last time he swiped tears from his eyes over fleeing his home and leaving his father was when the caravan of coaches started up again. If the Hale children could tell, they said nothing about it, sparing him that at least. He swore to himself he would not cry over it ever again. His father would not have approved of wallowing when he had found people, people that could one day be _his_ people. 

A rut in the road shook the cabin enough to jostle him awake. On the adjacent bench, Laura and Cora were tangled together in a web of blankets and furs, Cora’s head resting on her sister’s chest as if they were very young. 

Stiles found himself similarly entrenched into Derek’s side, a heavy arm curled around his back. He did not remember arranging himself this way; before he had nodded off, Derek was on the other side of the bench, propped against the far window and already asleep. Hale was solid under him, something to steady him as the wagon wheels bumped along the uneven ground, and under their covers was sweltering. He hadn’t been so warm in two days – he had also never slept so close to another man that was not his father. 

His cheeks were fiery from the imposition of it, accidental or not, and he carefully worked to extract himself and retreat back to the window when Derek’s arm tightened on him. The sensation sent a thrum down his length, one so powerful and unexpected his breath hitched.

“Stop squirming,” Derek’s voice came from somewhere above him, irritated at being roused, irritated as if this were a normal thing and Stiles were bothering him purposefully. 

“Mr. Hale-,”

Derek grunted at for what Stiles had to assume was the usage of his polite title. Nothing about Derek Hale was polite; _of course_ , being referred to respectfully would irk him. Stiles tried to glare at him, but the cabin was lit sparsely by moonlight, not enough to see much passed his nose. He thought he could make out the curve of Derek’s jaw, the arrow-like points of his nostrils, all familiar with the exception of his smell. That vernal smell that clung of all of the Hales was overridden by an oakier, muskier scent; one that was powerfully _male_ and thick as smoke when Stiles breathed it in. 

The scent lit up his chest, dripped through him slow as honey rolling down its comb. There was nothing he could do to stop a shudder from rattling up his spine. 

Derek’s thumb ran over the bottom of his chin, drawing his head upward. It swiped a steady path back and forth and there was something circling in Stiles mind that he meant to say, but it was gone just was quickly, leaving his mouth parted, a thrill spiking through his core to his groin. The pad of Derek’s thumb grazed Stiles’s bottom lip, just barely, more the thought of a touch without being one and a faint whine left the man’s throat. 

He took his hand away then, letting out a frustrated grumble when he did. Stiles was rigid, his mouth dry, and – he wanted. He had wanted David in a naïve way, one he had been too childish to examine and after being so empty, empty as the day his mother died, he hadn’t thought there was a part of him left able to want what might leave him. He told himself it was a trick because Fox was curled up over the tops of his boots and he remembered how the beast had crazed Whittemore.   


If Derek Hale wanted him, it was only to bend him over a table to fuck him without having to see his face, without having to kiss him. He wouldn’t understand his desire even after he had gotten what Fox made him lust after. 

The Hale girls tore up the snow as they wrestled and Stiles watched with wide eyes. They had been antsy in the carriage, snipping words at each other and adjusting and moving constantly until Thalia ordered the caravan to a stop so each of them could stretch their legs a bit. The breaks they took for their journey seemed frequent, more frequent than Stiles would have imagined, though he had no comparison. But he welcomed any distraction that took him away from himself and his selfishness and the worried image of his father in his bed, staring into nothing. 

He had never seen two women their ages grapple in the dirt and snow the way the sisters did. Children, yes, even the occasional drunken, playful brawl, but this was, he had no baring for it. Cora shrieked as Laura got hands under her and flipped her in the air; she came flailing back face-down an undignified arch that ended in a bank of snow. And the others cheered them on, which was stranger still. 

“Would you like a turn?” and Stiles flinched, at Peter’s voice. There was some joke in the bemusement of his face, in his glinting gaze, that Stiles could not guess at. 

“No,” Stiles told him, because shaking his head, cowing away from the suggestion, would not have passed with Mr. Hale. It was as if Peter wanted him to speak, when Last Rest had despised it, but only to turn him inside-out and make him ridiculous. 

“We haven’t offended you finer sensibilities, have we?” Peter mused.

“If this is a ploy to rub yourself on me, you’ll have to try harder,” Stiles said innocently, drinking his coffee. 

A chuckle from somewhere in the vicinity of the circle around the sisters. Mr. Boyd and his wife, Erica, were both focused on he and Peter rather than the yarn ball of bodies throwing about the powder. But Mr. Hale’s smirk only furrowed his mouth further at the challenge. 

He leaned in, smelling like firewood, “If I wanted you, I would not have to trick you into anything.”

“If you wanted me I would throw myself down a well,” but despite the venom implied by his response, he felt a smile tug at one corner of his mouth. Peter’s eyes lit up enticingly and he snapped his teeth at Stiles’s shoulder before sauntering away. It was indecent and that may have been the point of it. Stiles stared into the black liquid in his cup. If being spoken to in that way and responding as he had was marked red in his mind, even as it was happening, then why was the reflection in his cup not more neutral? 

His face changed and he went back to the coach to sit until they began moving again. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lol what
> 
> it's here! again! 
> 
> listen. i fucking love peter hale. but Mother taught us that loving things is shameful. so he's like. not in a lot of my writing. UNTIL NOW. Peter is pretty integral i'd say. or he's not and i've just been slamming him into scenes for a year for no reason. 
> 
> whatever.
> 
> he's in it a lot. if you haven't noticed. but this is like where he really starts to get peter-y. also there was some actual sterek? crazy.
> 
> hey thanks for reading; it's pretty dope that i get to interact with you guys like this! like i recognize usernames now and i'm all 'oh fuk its xyz, they're here!' and then there's like twenty seconds of panic that i've made a giant grammatical error or some shit and that's literally the only reason they've come to flick my ear. which has literally never happened. i'm like one of those cheetahs that needs a service dog bc i'm too nervous to exist. even my atoms are like 'shit helen hates me guess i'll split'
> 
> but thank you a million times for supporting me! i wish i could kudos my readers for taking time out your busy lives for this. 
> 
> haha ok lov bye


	13. Chapter 13

Animals never strayed too close to the Wall. Cart horses had to be specially trained, walked along it with blinders for weeks until they were no longer frightened. There were no birds to sing perched at its top and no rodents, not even the rats were inclined to scratch around it in search of dropped crumbs. People would say they could feel the presence of it as well, a foreboding that made a deep, dark bowl in the pit of their stomach. Stiles felt something too when he would walk along it and peer through the loose stones.  

They called the feeling dread.  

Dread was his father catching him stealing sweets. It was seeing David Whittemore in the streets. It was being whipped with a belt.  

He had never quite been able to call the feeling, standing in the linear shadow of the Wall, by the same name. Fear of it had come later, but when he was too young, too stupid to know better, he could not call it dread. The Wildwood was something to be aware of. It forced itself on any who were drawn in too close. It existed, as did all things, but it was awake and breathing. Not dreadful, not unless it was given a reason to be.  

He did not know if he was angry with it. The Wood was the holy place of the Four and it was the Four that made him what he was. They had taken so much, and he supposed he could hate the place that sustained them, but had They and the Wood not given back some of what they stole?  

He chewed on his cuticles, pulling away winter dry skin and making small, red beads. The carriage bumped along and the Hale girls played a card game on the bench and Stiles’s forehead pressed to the chilled window pane. It had given him a gift, once, maybe more than once and maybe the Hales were a gift he had yet to fully comprehend. But once, for all of his time spent scrubbing floors, for the occasional cup to be pelted at him by an angry drunk, for the sad look in his father’s eyes, the Wood had given him a small endowment.  

He had seen his mother standing in the pinewood near to his bedroom window, her form, draped in all white but blurred by the glass panes. She had been bright as a star despite the midnight hour, her hand reaching out in to the gloom, bidding he join her.  

And Fox was nowhere near to laugh at him. He had crept from the house, tears stinging in his eyes and sprinted through the forest, tearing his night clothes and turning up mud. When he reached the clearing, there was no trace of Claudia, but a beast, covered in dark fur. Glowing, cerulean eyes watched him from the thicket, the Wall a towering black gate with no door. He was too young to be frightened, he thought, or perhaps he had known in the way children sometimes do that it would not harm him.  

And he knew this was a creature from beyond the Wall.  

Its breath was dewy in the light of the moon.  

He woke in his bed unable to remember when he had laid down to sleep. That was the way of dreams, he had thought; there was no beginning and no end. He would have continued to think it only a good dream until he found that his feet were muddy.  

But there were no muddied footprints leading to his bed or in the house.  

 

He never again awoke curled up to Derek Hale’s side. He saw very little of Derek at all and they did not trade words.  

 

“You said you have lived in Last Rest all of your life?” asked Miss Laura, abruptly, breaking a silence of hours. Stiles did not immediately recognize that it was he she was speaking to and his thoughts had gotten away from him while he watched the whited-out country race by.  

“Yes,” he mustered, his voice unsure after so much time spent in disuse.  

Her eyes grew squinty, “You are certain of this?” 

Derek grunted at her in warning, though she only rolled her eyes petulantly at him in response.  

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Stiles asked curiously. The sound Derek had made was one he recognized, so often did the man emit such sounds of irritation, but in this context Stiles could not quite capture the purpose of it.  

“You are… are you dreaming?” she asked and at this Derek vocalized, saying her name harshly.  

“What do you mean?” pushed Stiles, ignoring his outburst.  

“How can you be sure if you’re awake, when you dream in such colors?” A pill of blood dribbled down from her nose and Stiles touched his own lip to find that the pad of his fingers came away scarlet.  

 “Do I dream in blood?” 

 

Stiles gasped awake, struggling to pull in air, as if he were leagues below frigid waters and the cabin was full of night and rumbling and he struck out for the latch on the door. The coach was not moving terribly fast, not fast enough for him to break a bone, but falling from it and into the snow punched all of the air from his lungs. Shouting rose up and horses whinnied and the caravan of stages came to a grinding halt of noise and creaking wood.  

Stiles’s hands made fists in the snow, his chest heaving until he vomited, sweat on his chest and brow freezing in the cold and turning his hair to frost.  

“Stiles!” screeched Thalia Hale. Her boots were in the knee-deep snow behind him, crashing through it.  

He knew he was awake, he knew it, the ground was burning with cold and was solid under him and his bile smelled so strongly – he was awake. But, a moment ago he had not been and it had been so real and he could not say when he had fallen asleep. His brain scattered looking for the missing fragments. He had eaten his supper and drank his coffee as he did each night, he had relieved himself in a secluded area just off the road, he had climbed into the coach with the Hale sisters. Perhaps then, perhaps that was when – he threw up again and he was hot, so hot, he dowsed his head in the snow.  

Thalia got to him finally, her hand coming down on his back, her whole weight above him, protecting him.  

Did he really remember his dinner? The memory was so thin, the tail-end of a wisp of smoke. Was it truly the night’s campfire he remembered? Or was it the past three blended in to one moving picture? 

“Stiles,” Thalia said, hands clutching his shoulders, “Can you hear me?” 

“I don’t – remember,” he said around hard breaths, “Where have I – been?” 

“I told you this would happen, Tally,” came Peter’s voice.  

Ignoring him Thalia said to Stiles, “You’ve been here, Stiles, with us, don’t you remember? We ate stew for supper, on the road, just by Hidden Pond; you sat by me and Cora.” 

“I’m so hot,” he whined, shuddering, soaking in sweat, steam rising from his skin and Thalia held him closer to herself.  

“Your name is Stiles,” Thalia said firmly, “ _Say it_.” But his skin, his muscles, his bones were aflame; he was choking on the heat.  

“I’m – dreaming,” he garbled. His vision wavered. There were rodents in the fields, their hearts thrumming and they scratched and scurried and bent the snow.  

“ _Stiles_!” Thalia barked, “ _Say it_!”  

He could not disobey her, every string of him cinched at her command and he said, “My name – is Stiles.”  

“You do not walk in the Wood,” Thalia told him, like cold iron, “You walk on the path.” 

“I – I do not,” he swallowed on tacky spit, “walk in the Wood.” 

“Where do you walk?” she demanded.  

“On, on the path.”  

“Say it again.” 

“I do not walk in the Wood,” and he breathed on the words, “I walk on the path.”  

It was there, in and out of his mind, the golden forest of yellowing autumn leaves and the gravel road. The brush so dense, there was no sky, only the trees and their fading leaves, the path crunching under his boots.  

 _I am Stiles._  

Thalia hummed somewhere in the back on his mind, “To forget the path, is to forget myself.”  

The cold and the heat joined into a braid. Snow melt in his hands was turning to mist and he could no longer see the glowing field they crouched in or hear stamping horse hooves and snorts.  

 _I do not walk in the Wood. I walk on the path. To forget the path_ _,_ _is to forget myself._  

 _I am Stiles._  

He meandered along the winding road and it would vanish from him, hiding away until he called it back, told it that he belonged on it. Red fur flashed behind a tree and he found that he walked no farther and cold turned his breath to ice in his throat. He was fixed on the roots of that tree, terror coursing, being driven through him by a pounding hammer and Fox was there, hiding, making all of his hair stand on end. It peeked out from the place it hid, and he realized he had never seen it so clearly, never so directly.  

He had expected a familiar face, like the foxes that prowled the outskirts of town or in the barley fields, but as Fox edged out from the tree, its eyes too large, too far apart and blank as the moon, the black corners of its mouth drooping too low and drooling, he realized that it was anything but. Its fur was matted and dirty and frantic; a deranged creature, and hideous, mad with disease or evil or both.  

He screamed, tried to run, to bolt into the forest –  

Hands fell on both of his cheeks, planting him to the spot, and he thrashed, he had to run, had to get away and he fought and bit and snarled, but the hands would not let go.  

 _You are Stiles._  

 _I am Stiles._  

He was dressed as a shadow; broad, tall, shielding Stiles from the Fox. No. Not shielding him from it. The man was on bended knee and he was tall only because Stiles was so small. Nothing hid behind the tree.  

A hand petted over his head, lying flat one of his ears.  

_Stay on the path and I will find you at its end._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is possibly some of my favorite writing in all of LR. i frickn live for this delirious/mystical/hallucinatory shit. 
> 
> i swear there will be actual answers at some point. and not more. yknow. plot buns. 
> 
> ahem. since the holidays are starting up there will be one more update next week and then a short break until the first week of January. it's looking more and more like Darling and I will have to travel to see family this year (folks are getting older so its up to us young, spry chickens to deliver ourselves). obviously, its going to be a busy week so i'm not going to add to the stress by trying to pinch off another chapter.
> 
> thanks for supporting me this year! i won't launch into another long thing, but i really hope that, despite everything going on around our beloved Internet and some of the negative feelings and panic that has arisen recently in fannish and NSFW communities, that you are safe and healthy in 2019. Supporting and protecting each other has never been so important and not just because shit is going wrong, but because when there are no challenges to face sometimes we forget how important our communities are. Hard times suck, but they are a good reminder that sticking together was never not an option. 
> 
> May your candles burn brightly, may your tree never dry out and may you find contentment even if you have no traditions to celebrate. Happy Holidays!
> 
> -Atticus
> 
> ps. and may the assholes lube themselves amirite lol


	14. Chapter 14

“You did not know this would happen,” his mother spat, pacing on the road. Torches made her face soft in their golden light, no matter how deeply the grimace ate into her visage. 

“We knew it was a possibility, Thalia,” Peter said calmly, arms crossed over his chest. 

“What would you have me do?” she growled, “Bring him back to that _place_? He belongs with us and I know he feels it, he just doesn’t understand yet.” 

“And how are you planning to explain it to him?” his uncle challenged, “You may be able to explain it away once, but he is a smart boy. He will not be bought in by lies for long. And the Moon –,” 

“You don’t know what the Moon will do to him,” Thalia snapped, “he’s twenty-two, if it were to affect him it would have done so by now.” 

“Why would he tell us if it had? We should have been frank with him from the beginning.” 

“He needs to come to it gradually, it’s not the same as it was rearing the children.”

Derek’s jaw clenched and locked and he tilted back his head until it came undone. His eyes grazed over the pinkening scar on his hand; each time he looked it over, it had become harder to see, growing smaller and smaller, melting back into unbroken skin. Blood still marred his cuff, though the fabric was too black to see it even if the sun were shining on it. The scent of it was sharp and his smell twined with spit that was not his. 

Laura put in, “We do not really know what he is.” And Peter and Thalia looked on her tiredly. She always thought she had some insight that no one else had. But their mother and uncle had thought those words a thousand times over by the expressions making exhausted work of their faces. He had heard them late in the night, toiling over the few books they had brought on the voyage and muttering.    


“We need to get him to Fever Hill, we need a controlled environment,” Thalia said to her brother.

“I do not disagree,” said Peter pensively, “But consider that we haven’t the faintest idea what triggered him, he likely doesn’t even know. We know almost nothing about him. I’ve been to Cross Roads, I’ve seen what they do to our kind and Last Rest may not be so brutal, but they are well on their way to becoming that place. Mayor Hubbard said he attacked a girl during his schooling and bit off a piece of her ear,” at this Thalia scoffed, but Peter continued, “True or not, I believe wholly that there have been incidences and that part of him is totally feral, worse it is a part he may not be aware of. He bit your son for God’s sake,” he said, thrusting an arm at Derek and Derek winced at being used to further his uncle’s point. 

“We should sequester him to a _cage_ , then?” Thalia snarled. 

“Oh, stop being overly dramatic,” hissed Peter, “Cora has done worse to all of us at one point or another, but he is out of control. He can’t be allowed around people, not knowing what we do now. One of the coaches should go ahead of us to resupply at the next haberdashery and we can meet with them well away from any outposts.”

“He will know something is wrong,” Thalia said worriedly, hand covering her mouth in thought when she finished speaking. 

“We’re still miles from the nearest township,” piped up Erica. She stood in the circle of Vernon’s arms, his face buried in the spun gold of her hair, “Peter’s is a good plan and there is a hot spring nearby. We could tell him we are stopping to enjoy it and send the other wagons on.” 

And Boyd added, “There is nothing that can be done until we reach the Den. No use wringing our hands over nothing; I like this idea as well.” 

“Puppy?” Thalia asked, looking on Derek, and it was pointless she should ask his opinion at all, but his mother was a fair matriarch, or tried to be whenever she could. The others rested their gazes on him as well and he wished they would not. It had been decided that he be consulted on these matters weeks ago, despite his fervent desire that he not be. He could not make decisions that effected the family; he could scarcely make them for himself. 

“It’s a good idea,” he muttered. 

As a child, Derek had spent summers reading under the trees of his family’s territory. There had not been many children that liked to do the same and the others would run and wrestle and, in time, learned it was better to ignore him rather than waste those precious few hours of daylight attempting to goad him into their games. 

And then they had adopted Vernon. Derek never knew from what place he had come, only that his smells were confusing, hurting smells that warned the other children away. He had been scrawny and slow moving and there was scar on his face. Cora and Laura had whispered about it, trying to guess what was powerful enough to leave a lasting scar on one of their kind. His eldest sister insisted it was put there by the claw of an alpha male and that they were fortunate their mother was their alpha else they might too have been made ugly by punishment. 

They had been wrong, of course. Sex played no role in aggression and the scratch of an alpha did fade eventually, though it might take months depending on the severity, or so Derek had read in their many times great grandmother’s journals. Boyd told him when they were older, eating lunch in the orchard one spring afternoon, that his father had made the mark before he had been given the Gift. And sometimes Derek wished he could scar, that things he had done would leave a lasting raised line in his skin in order to remind him never to be foolish again. But even that was a foolish thought, one Boyd may have never forgiven him saying. 

It was decided that Vera and Isaac would drive one of the coaches on to the next station while the rest went to the springs. They plotted the course by torchlight and discussed timing and Thalia scribbled out a letter for posting to their house in Fever Hill. Derek did not involve himself in this and they did not ask his help. He stood by the horses and watched the wind pick up dustings of snow and whip them across the white plains. Vernon was coming to stand by him and he felt the man’s approach in his bones and nape before seeing him. He had grown from an acorn, battered and chipped, into an oak; each summer standing boarder and taller than the last. His stature had surpassed Derek’s long ago, something Laura liked to tease him on, though Laura’s head seemed stuffed with sawdust on the best of days. 

For a long while they stood together in silence watching the night. It was not in Vernon’s way to be intrusive, he lacked the interest needed to delve into a person’s private affairs. And when he approached Derek, as he sometimes did when he could feel something was amiss, it was never to pry, merely to exist in the same space. 

Derek scratched his chin and said, “I thought about going with Isaac.” Boyd would understand. For this, he might have been the only person who could. 

“You’d have been miserable,” Boyd told him and it made his choice to remain sound as if it were the right one, but even still it felt wrong. Wrong to go, wrong to stay. If he had never agreed to accompany his mother and uncle at all and stayed in Fever Hill to look after things, he would have been spared a little while longer. He could picture himself there, having taken the other path, reclining in his window seat and watching the snow birds. 

“It’s too soon,” he heard himself say and was mortified to hear the words, much less see the silvery traces they left in the air. 

Vernon nodded, smiling shallowly, “Never a good time,” he agreed, “I still feel ill over it sometimes.”

“He’s not a wolf,” Derek said and he was angry and scared and his mind had been screaming those words for weeks. From the first time in the square of that horrid little town when Peter had smelt something – different, had made him test the air as well until they were both staring at a pale creature that stared back at them. To Boyd he confided, “There was a peddler he spoke with that meant to follow him to the fields,” and it topped off his rage again to say it after so long holding it close to himself.

“Are you angry that this peddler was thinking on something wicked or that he may have been hurt?”

Derek glared at the ground. 

“It’s a terrible feeling,” Boyd told him, “sometimes I wake up in the night, sweating, heart racing, thinking of all the ways things could go wrong; thinking she’s in danger even when she’s asleep beside me.” 

“What do you do?”

Boyd breathed in the night air, eyes going across the fallowing fields, “I stay close to her.”

Derek felt himself nod, though he could not say why he did. Habit perhaps. There was a way in which Boyd was right, as he often was, but Derek was not at a place solid enough to understand it yet. He would do as Boyd said and the path might unfurl for him eventually. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, feedback is always welcome!
> 
> The next chapter will be posted in the first week of January! Happy Holidays!


	15. Chapter 15

 Stiles awoke from dreamless sleep back into the cold of winter. Familiar sounds and smells brought him forward to knead his eyes and pull in a lung of sharpened air. He climbed from the coach to stretch his creaky limbs. He felt like the trees did when the temperature dropped: ready to enter a great sleep but squeaking and talking when the hard wind blew by. He did not recognize the place they had stopped to camp. Where ever it was, it was far from the road and a bout of disorientation made his eyes squeeze shut. 

The field was cloaked in a dense mist that made the air clammy, but frigid nonetheless. He found the Hales circled, as seemed their routine, around the morning’s fire with Thalia’s son absent. By the sun, they should have been making ready to leave soon, but nothing was packed, rather, packs and crates were scattered about; the horses stood under a low scrim of trees grunting into their feed bags. 

Stiles poured coffee into a tin mug resting atop one of the grain barrels and went to where Mr. Hale was lounging with his black traveling hat drawn down over his eyes. 

“Do you need help readying to leave?” Stiles asked, his throat parched suddenly so he downed a bit of his cup. 

Peter did not stir and he wondered if Mr. Hale had heard him until, “We’re stopped for a rest. So much time on the road is terrible for the complexion.” 

“Where is the other wagon?” 

“Went on ahead to the depot to resupply.” 

Stiles bounced on the balls of his feet. The others were focused on their plates, shoveling down rounds of bacon and beans and fried potatoes except for the girls who were pensively studying fans of cards clutched in their hands. Their game was Gin Rummy from the looks. And it was too… ordinary. The Hales were anything but based on Stiles’s experience with them and to see them so normal set him on edge for a reason he could not place. 

“Where are we?” he asked, turning his attentions back on Peter. 

“I leave such details to the little people.” 

“Oh.” 

“But I think I could do with a soak, care to join?”

“There’s a bath house near?” 

Mr. Hale sat forward, tipping back his cap with a sly grin, “If only, mon petit renard.” 

Clearly, he was not going to produce a detailed answer unless Stiles indulged him and given the strange quiet of the camp, the eyes Stiles could feel on him that would dart away should he look, he found himself inclined to do so. And so, he agreed. 

The fog grew thicker still as they walked and the ground more wrought with crags of gnarled gray rock. Peter made polite conversation, but Stiles could scarcely concentrate on it. His dreams, when he did have them, were taking on a quality of realness that left him drifting, unable to discern his sleeping self from that of his waking self. And this landscape was not helping him find evidence that he was not truly asleep, curled up on the carriage bench. 

Interrupting whatever benign musing was trickling out of Peter he said suddenly, “Has something happened?” 

And Peter paused, coming to a halt with Stiles standing dizzily at his side. 

“Something has always happened,” he said maddeningly and Stiles stared at him, hoping that his impatience was able to crack the dazed veil sheeting his expression. Peter said, “I suspect you’ve been feeling a bit off since leaving Last Rest. A little homesick?”

“I miss my father,” Stiles admitted, though he was unsure if that low feeling was the source of his feeling so alien. 

Peter nodded and kept walking, “You’ve led a traumatic life, Stiles, more so than the rest of us I should think and you’re vulnerable now. It’s not strange that you feel that way. Even if that backwater was cruel to you, it was familiar. It will take time for you to adjust.” 

They walked on in silence, passing stark, spindling, leafless trees and losing them again in the mist. Stiles asked, “Are you witches?” And when he asked it, he found that it was not a concept that frightened him, at least, not as it would have before meeting them. They had not used their magic to harm him, the opposite really. They healed him and hid him from the many winking, watching eyes of the Harvestmen. His town, the Church, made it so clear cut the line between what was the Devil’s work and what was not and the Hales skirted that line in a way he had not known possible. 

“No,” Peter told him, “we’re not witches. I have known my share of witches, however, and they’ve all been impeccably dull. The ones that haven’t tried to skin and sacrifice me, that is.” And Mr. Hale gave him a wink. 

Quietly, Stiles asked of the snowy ground, “Am I a witch?”

“I should think not, but that is for you to know.” 

“If I was… you wouldn’t fear me?” 

Peter said, “I fear everything, that is why I’m alive. I fear you as you are. But Tally never would, such is her disposition; you could hold a knife to her belly, threatening to spill her guts and she would only love you for it.” 

“That’s horrible.”

“My sister is a saint of lost and broken things,” he sighed. 

“That’s why you’ve not married?” Stiles asked, “Because you protect her?” 

“Marriage is a pointless sentimental contract.” 

Stiles thought of remarking on what a lonely existence Peter’s must have been, but he would not have been saying anything the man, himself, had not already considered. Enough people had told Stiles what he was, what he would be, and to cast those sorts of words about carelessly would do nothing to endear him to Peter Hale. 

The hot spring was a turquoise cauldron, barely visible through the curtains of fog. Seeing it gave Stiles the footing he was missing. These pockets of healing waters were only revealed at the slopes beneath the great volcano, the mountain under which a demon king was said to slumber. Tiered shelves of white and gray rock jutted down a gently graded hill, each filled with unmoving, fantastically blue water. 

Already soaking in one of the pools was Derek Hale, his clothes neatly folded and stacked atop an outcropping. His head was tipped back and his arms stretched out across the worn stone behind him. A smattering of sweat wetted the valley of his chest and there was color there, his skin reddened by the heat pouring off the placid water’s surface. The pang returned, the sap-like throb Stiles had felt in the carriage after waking tucked into Derek’s side. He swallowed thickly, his mouth going dry. 

“And I thought you were off tearing about the woods in a fit of angst,” Peter said, doffing his jacket. 

Derek’s head came up off the stone at his uncle’s voice, looking stony himself as if he had become part of the pool he sat in. He said nothing more than what could be interpreted by his glare. The expression changed some when he saw Stiles at Peter’s side, but if Stiles’s presence bothered him, he remained silent about it. 

Peter stripped out of his clothes, cursing the cold and slid into the water with a hiss and then a welcoming groan as the heat folded him in. But Stiles was stuck to the spot, heart sputtering. He could not have known what to expect in coming here, but this was quite far from anything he had anticipated. And… for a moment, his feelings were eddies, swirling as the mountain spring did, turning in and out at the prospect of peeling off his clothing under Derek Hale’s gaze. He recalled Derek’s anger at the doctor, remembered the rough feeling of having a blanket wrapped around him, sparing him any dignity he might have had left. 

“Walk back if you like,” Peter said, eyes drifting closed as he got comfortable. 

Stiles considered this, but never broke his eyes away from Derek’s. He… he did not want to go back. The coiling in his gut, the chuffing of the fox out somewhere in the wastes, it urged him on like it had in David’s office. What he had done in the chapel was wrong because he had been told until that moment and after, that it was. If it was, he was not the only one that had been wrong. 

He shrugged out of his coat and the icy wind pierced through his shirt, raising goose flesh across his arms and chest. This did not feel wrong and it did not feel right. He was straddling that line as the Hale’s did and he found that he didn’t want to cower away from it. He toed off his boots and stuffed his socks into them and Derek’s eyes were jewels as they observed, the rise and fall of his strong chest steady. He might never know why Derek watched him this way, like he saw nothing else and never wanted to again and Stiles thought that maybe it was better he never know. Because his mind filled in the reason with such lovely thoughts that he knew could never be true. He might regret this moment someday if Derek ever chose to expose whatever twisted, cruel thing lived in him; the sort of dark, unsaid cruelty that buried deep roots in most men. But at this moment, Stiles bathed in the sensation of being seen without trepidation.

He undid the buttons of his shirt with shaking hands turned violet with cold and sucked in sharp breath when he passed his navel, his stomach tensing against the air. His shirt dragged on his nipples, hardening them with its light touch when he had thought they could not have ached more. He stepped from his trousers and folded his things in the driest place he could manage. He had been naked so many times before, sometimes whether he had wanted to be or not, and he had grown callous to it. The doctor and his school teacher, Jackson Whittemore and Halsey and Danny, they used it to punish him, but when Derek’s eyes flickered over his skin, when a small part formed between his lips, he felt something he’d not felt before and a piece of his being, buried in him and hidden away long ago, wept. 

“Are your intentions to freeze to death?” griped Mr. Hale, smashing the silence. Flushing, Stiles stepped in to the pool and sat, knees tucked up to his chest and arms looped loosely around them. As a gawky adolescent this position may have allowed him space between the Hales and himself, but he had long since filled in, his back and arms having broadened from his labors and the hot spring was cramped despite his effort. Warmth made him quake with shock, heating him so rapidly black spots ate up his vision. 

“Your mother was wise to rest here,” Peter said to the air, easing back further. Derek made no indication he had heard his uncle and this did nothing to deter Peter from continuing on. He was clearly more infatuated with the sound of his own voice than he was with any other sound. “These springs are said to heal even damage to the soul.” 

“Is your soul damaged?” Stiles asked, if only to alleviate some of the weight of Derek’s stare. It was oddly comforting to feel so presently watched, as if Derek would be the first to leap into action should something go amiss, but Peter’s company complicated what otherwise would have been an intimate silence. Not to engage him was too revealing, though what it was Stiles was trying to hide he struggled to put words to. 

“Oh yes, horribly; or so light eyes are said to convey. Personally, I find that I am quite comfortable with my choices.” 

“ _Peter_ ,” Derek barked and Stiles was taken aback to hear him speak and find his attention diverted. 

Peter flicked water at his nephew with a few careless fingers, “I thought you, of anyone in this family, would agree with my point of view,” he said blandly, “Always so quick to obey mommy.”

Derek scowled at Peter and then at the water and Stiles bristled. 

“I’m not stupid,” Stiles said, glaring at Peter.

“Oh?”

“If Mrs. Hale has told you to keep something from me, then you should.”

“Mistress Hale?” Peter chuckled, “I wouldn’t use such an honorific around my sister if I were you.” 

Despite his earlier remark about not being stupid, Peter was gifted at making him feel that way. But Stiles refused to let himself be distracted by Peter’s teasing. 

“He’s right, Peter,” growled Derek. 

Peter rolled his eyes, “I’ve said nothing, have I? So, by all means, the two of you should continue to live blissfully in your ignorant little bubbles. You make quite a pair.” This looked to unnerve Derek, forcing his gaze and his features to fall and he said nothing in return. If he would not, then Stiles could not help but do it for him, the impulse rising out of what could only be a misplaced sense of opposition. 

“You like riling people up, don’t you?” Stiles snapped, “It’s sad, Mr. Hale, that the only satisfaction you get out of existing is by pushing people and making them feel ridiculous for it.” 

Peter leaned into his space, “When you’ve been alive as long as I have, you’ll find that is the only pleasure there is. All of this,” he waved his hand vaguely, “all of these rules we impose on ourselves are a pointless exercise in futility. Some people use them to assert themselves over others and the rest are happy enough to accept it for no other reason than they have been told they should. If I make you feel ridiculous it is because you _should_ feel that way; _rules_ are inherently ridiculous and my sister’s rules are no exception. One day, I think you will find that you agree, you might even ask me to help you break a few.” 

“And whose rule is it that you stay with Thalia?” Stiles countered, “You don’t agree with her, you argue with her children constantly and yet you stay.” 

“I stay because I would be truly miserable without her,” Peter said plainly, and his answer was far more earnest than Stiles had expected. Earnest because it was painfully clear that Peter’s attachment to his sister had nothing to do with being related to her. He was bonded to her in a way that exceeded familial expectations. Stiles could not bring himself to say aloud what his mind had suddenly come to understand: Thalia made his humanity a breathing, living thing, despite himself. “And you, Stiles?” Peter asked, his voice dragging the close air between them, “Why do you stay with us? You’re frightened of us and the way we make you feel. I can smell it all over you, every time one of us gets too close, does something outside of the limited scope that depressing little town instilled in you. And don’t be boring with your answer. Don’t tell me it’s because you’ve no other choice, because all three of us, even Derek, knows you’ve nothing but choices.” 

Stiles squared up to him as much as he could, vinegar running in his veins, his mouth pressed to a hard line, “Nothing I say is the correct answer and anything I do say only serves to open me up to more of your ridicule.” 

Peter laughed dryly and leaned back, freeing enough space between them so that Stiles could breathe again. 

“True,” Mr. Hale chuckled, “As you said, I enjoy getting a rise out of people.”

“And you’re dying to tell me what I think so you might as well,” Stiles said succinctly. 

“Hmm,” Peter mused, “We give you an excuse to behave in a way everyone you have ever met has condemned you for. You’re a wild animal that’s been in a cage far too long and we are the forest spreading endlessly before you.” 

Stiles wished he could be angry with Mr. Hale’s assessment, and maybe he was if only because the man was able to put pithy words to what had been a froth of emotions and nothing more. 

Peter continued on, “And I admit, indulging you is a sort of fascination of mine. I’m curious just how wild you truly are.”

“You’re describing me as if I’m your family’s pet,” Stiles said around a clenched jaw. 

“You’re not our pet,” said Derek, surprising them both, eyes burning with more words that were tightly bottled. 

“No, not our pet,” Peter agreed, “My view of you is far higher than that; you have the potential to be our equal, or I suspect, our better, given time and space to grow. But I’m afraid, as you said, Tally has forbidden me to speak anymore on the subject. Though I could be persuaded to should you ask me outright, not even my sister could deny me an answer to a direct question.” 

Peter’s gaze dared him to ask, to beg him for an answer, to tell Stiles why he was plagued by dark thoughts, why his worst fantasies, even ones he had not known he had, seemed to come to pass; why everyone he had ever known feared him, including his own father. But he kept his mouth sealed if only to prove he was not as weak to Peter’s charms as Peter knew he was. In weeks or months, perhaps he might cave in to his own need to know, but it would not be today.  

“As you wish,” Peter said in answer to his silence, “I’ll say nothing until you ask me.” 

“Stop toying with him,” growled Derek. 

“So _protective_ ,” Peter shot back, far more severely than deserved and Derek came forward, stare cold enough to freeze a man solid.

“You’ve said what you wanted and now you’re finished.” 

This time when the light caught in Derek’s eyes it was no trick; the winter sun was too low and the fog too dense. His irises flashed an ancient, glowing lapis, a color reserved only for a hidden sort of magic, the kind he would have been burned for in Last Rest. Peter gave a mocking gasp and then smirked and Derek’s face went stricken. Stiles was not the object of Peter’s taunting, merely a tool used to manipulate his nephew into doing something he should not have. Stiles’s core when cold, forgetting for a moment that he sat in volcanic waters. 

He couldn’t help but admire Peter’s cunning, twisted and cruel though it was. He had admitted he was sworn to say nothing to Stiles’s of the Hale family’s secrets and Stiles had not wanted to know, but he could not un-see what he had and it sent a streak of blind terror through him. 

Breath shuddering out of him, Stiles choked, “ _Shifter_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey yall happy new year
> 
> here's a long'un. 
> 
> hope you enjoyed it, please comment if you feeling the urge and have a great first week!


	16. Chapter 16

Derek did not show signs of the Wolf until he was far passed the expected age.  His sisters both experienced their first Moon when they reached the age of thirteen. For years, despite his looks, the set of his eyes and his pointed eye-teeth, his family thought him untouched by the Spirit, a lone human in a pack of wolves. And when he did turn finally, in an unexpected fit of rage, claws bursting from his fingers and mats of black animal hair from an elongated canine face, he had mauled the man that was supposed to be his father. 

He was too large, too fast, too strong, too quick to anger to be taught the ways Thalia had taught Laura with and would later employ to teach Cora. Her meditations and chants did nothing to calm his mind and give him back control over his body. She and Peter were forced to turn him loose in the Wood beyond the Wall, for what other place could they bring him where he was certain not to come upon humans? For months he had lived in filth, feeding on dead creatures for lack of any usable hunting abilities. He still woke in a cold sweat from dreams of mites in his fur and rank blood crusted to his muzzle, crying to the Moon to stop the pain. And Moon had never answered. She hung in the night, grinning down on him and offering no words of comfort, no warm hearth to lay beside. 

When Thalia thought he knew enough control, she had brought him back to Fever Hill and his sisters had been awkward, unsure of him or what he meant to their pack. Laura no longer fawned over him as she had before the Change, rubbing her face in his hair or curling around him when he slept. She sensed that he would assume a place above her when for so long he had been lower in their caste than even Cora, who had yet to present her wolf. And his mother… she blamed herself for not preparing him, for assuming he would always be her delicate mortal son. 

He slept alone. He ate alone. When the Moon turned her full attention to world, he suffered her curse, her gift, alone. 

And after being alone for so long, self-imposed or not, his wolf cracked under the absence of its pack. He no longer remembered what the argument had been about, but he remembered going blind with rage, he remembered throwing over the dinner table, his claws marring the grain, his roar shaking the crystal chandelier, and he remembered lunging for Laura’s throat. Peter had tackled him before he could get close enough to harm her. He had tried to apologize, mortified, but he suspected she never truly forgave him and the others – he hated the doe-like eyes they gave him should the subject of his control ever arise. 

Derek sat on a log by the fire, head cradled in both hands, mind roaring. Peter had gotten what he wanted as he always managed to do and Derek could do nothing about it. He couldn’t admit to his mother how it had happened, couldn’t give Peter the satisfaction of hearing it aloud, that he had been played like a fiddled; too stupid to control own instincts. His uncle and his mother fought now, in whispered hisses and growls, neither daring to yell as he knew they wanted to. It was the same argument, again, again, again. And Thalia had lost only because she had not kept her brother away, even knowing him as she did; she had never been good at denying him. 

The log shifted as Cora slid into the empty space beside him. She insistently nestled into his side, poking and goading until he lifted his arm so that she could lay against him for warmth. The air sucked in by his throat as she pulled in his scent. She was the only one, aside from their mother, who touched him in this way. The others would rub his cheeks, sniff at his hair if he was ever gone too long, but they would never allow themselves to be trapped in his arms. He wore his betrayal, his lashing out at Laura, as a brand that they could all sense, even Boyd. But Cora was young still, too young to remember or to have fully understood what he had done. Maybe she would grow to know what he was to the pack one day, but, hopefully, that day was long off still. 

“Uncle Peter is an abominable ass,” she whispered. Instinctively, he looked to their mother, still engaged in her quarrel, and Peter, but they were each too distracted by the other to have heard. And if they had, neither was terribly skilled at punishing their youngest daughter, not with her huge brown eyes and soft, porcelain face. Derek had no words to give her in response. Peter had done what came naturally to him and Derek had not known enough to make himself discrete. Or worse, he had known enough, but could not – could _not_ – keep his focus while his heart was laid out before him, breathing and blinking and batted about for sport. 

“Mother doesn’t blame you,” Cora muttered unhelpfully. 

“I know.” 

Thalia may not have been able, or willing, to pour over the subtext of what Derek had told her: that he had lost control because of Peter’s games and Stiles had known what he had seen, but his little sister, with frightening acuity, had laid bare the true events in a matter of seconds. She knew as well as he what Peter was capable of.

“He’s still sitting,” Cora said and Derek did not need her words to know. He could not stop himself listening, ears awake to any new movement, to heartbeat and breath; sounds he could not bring himself to ignore so wrong was the idea of leaving Stiles totally alone. He had stopped pacing, churning and trampling snow and had been sat for an hour on a stump just inside the endarkened tree line. 

“He hasn’t run away screaming for help,” said his sister softly, as if this fact should offer Derek any comfort at all. Absconding to the forest, somewhere far from the Hales and uttering not a word or giving even a shadow of his feelings was far worse in Derek’s mind. If Stiles had run, he would have understood and it would have been a painful thing – ghosts of dread at the thought made him sick down to the soles of his feet even now – but this, being denied anything useful, being forced to sit and wait, it was unbearable. Derek, in one careless motion, had unraveled his true self and the selves of his family and Stiles had given him nothing for it. And it was as much as he deserved. Who was he to expect, to demand, an answer from Stiles or any human in his position? This made him sicker still. 

“Rejection is only one of infinite possibilities,” said Cora. He was not surprised by her words, he had never been much for concealing himself from her. He had heard the phrase enough times to roll his eyes at it. Such simple words meant to dismiss gloomy feelings never put him at ease; they were merely a distraction no better than a street magician’s sleight of hand. 

He was on his feet the instant he heard the first footfall and his heart began to stammer when he heard the next, and the next, faster and faster until he thought his ears might burst. Stiles stepped into the orange circle of glow given off by their campfire. Peter and Thalia had stopped their bickering, perhaps when they saw Derek shoot upwards or when they heard Stiles’s approach themselves. With bated breath the pack regarded him, none of them moving to him for fear he might bolt. Eyes like rosin in the low light, moved around to each of them; they did not come to Derek first or last, giving him no real position, as if he meant nothing, and… it had been an absurd, childish fantasy that he could mean anything to Stiles. What had he offered? No comfort, no real words, only a means to douse pain. How could anyone have warmth or even love for the damp cloth on their forehead or the bandage on their arm? 

“Have you ever killed anyone?” Stiles asked generally, face set, not angrily or out of fear, but numbly. 

Thalia looked too conflicted to answer him and so Peter, unabashedly, said, “Yes.” 

Stiles gave a pensive nod, his mind was turning over, mulling on the answer without more information and Derek wanted to scream. 

Finally, he said, “I’m like you, aren’t I?” 

“We don’t know,” Thalia told him firmly, “not for certain, but you are… it doesn’t matter what you are. We care for you all the same.” 

Stiles glared at her, his hair peaked into an unwashed arch from where he had undoubtedly been clutching at it while he thought. “There are girls in Last Rest that are made to do horrible things, that are raped just so they can feed themselves. You didn’t help them, you probably didn’t even notice them, because no one really wants to see them until they have some need. You chose me because I’m like you. If I’d not been…,” he closed his mouth, lips thinning and eyes doleful, the unspoken _I would not be here now_ ringing like a clarion song. 

What Stiles could not know was that Thalia saw the things he had described, and a few worse, and she would have knelt in the streets to clean their feet and wash their hair and dress them well if she could have, but to what end? No one could save them all and Peter had tried to stop her coming to Stiles in the church that night; tried to stop her drawing more attention to them than they already had. It would have been for the better, Derek thought bitterly, if she had taken in those girls, instead of coming to Stiles’s aid. No one would think it strange, a woman of new wealth, spending her generosity on impoverished young women driven to prostitution. But to take in Stiles, a Fox Child, a person lower than any whore and to do so, so publicly would cost them greatly in ways they had yet to discover and on this was the only point Derek and Peter had agreed. 

Maybe Stiles was right and Thalia’s last shred of ability to look away from the ugliness of human society was spent when she saw one of her own kind being beaten in the square. But how could they explain something like this to him? Stiles’s persecution was sprung from a different womb altogether, even if the hatred of Fox Children intersected occasionally with that of Shifters, he was clearly struggling with the concept that he might be one of them. There was no unity in his struggle, no pack to return to, he was forced to shoulder it all alone, closed off in a cell of glass walls.

“You hate us then? You think we did this to you?” demanded Erica, arms crossed over her chest.  Boyd put a hand to her shoulder, but she shrugged him off and came forward, angry when the rest of them could not bring themselves to it. “What a tragedy you live in,” she snapped and Derek winced at her bite, “to have been taken in when no one wanted you. We’ve never laid a cruel hand on you and yet the moment you discover what we are, you dare to _judge us_? That _cunt_ David Whittemore tried to _rape_ you and you haven’t said a word against him!”

She could very well have smacked him for the impact of her words and Derek’s wolf threatened his bones, setting them aflame, but he forced himself to breathe. 

“Erica, that’s quite enough,” said Thalia, pale and stricken. Composing herself, she said to Stiles, “You are right to be wary of us,” the admission cost her something, something even Derek could feel in the pit of his gut, “There are those of our kind that deserve fear, just like there are mortals who deserve the same. You asked if we have ever killed and, as Peter said, the answer is yes, but I swear to you we have never done so for the sport of it. We choose to live among humans, because we know we are better, can be better, than mindless beasts. 

“And I chose to intervene when I saw what was done to you because it has been done to me. I inherited the Wolf from the Ether, born to mortal parents and so did Peter. We were kept in cages, we were restrained and beaten and hidden away and I could not watch something like happen again and do nothing.”

The salty scent of sadness perforated that of the burning wood and wash of snow. It leaked from Thalia at first, her eyes wet and then from Stiles. A couple of tears rolled down his cheeks and he looked away from her, to the side to see nothing and keep himself from crying anymore. 

“We did not know how to tell you,” Thalia went on, “nothing seemed right, not with all that’s happened. I thought you should come to it gradually and I am truly sorry it had to be this way.” 

Nodding miserably, sniffing, Stiles said, “I don’t hate you.” And Thalia went to him, arms open and wrapped him up. Derek had thought he would cower away, but he did not. He was pliant against her and then returned her embrace, knuckles scarred and alabaster on her coat. 


	17. Chapter 17

Derek lay on his back as the fire burned low. Any who might have seen him might have thought he was watching the stars and he wished he could have cared about them enough to gaze kindly up at them. The sky could be vacant blackness and it would have held no more or less fascination to him. He was merely waiting. Waiting for sleep, for the next day, for sleep to come again. It was all he was able to do; dragging from one moment to the next and praying that one day it might end and he could not say if this end he was always trying to reach meant death. He wasn’t so dramatic as Peter to frame it in that way, even if they both seemed to be waiting for the same thing. 

His family slept on the other side of the smoking embers, breathing soundly, tangled up in each other, except for his uncle who had little stomach for so much closeness. Peter had gone back to the driver’s bench of the coach, for solitude, though Derek often wondered how much sleeping he did on any given night. 

He sat up cautiously when he heard the coach’s cabin door creak open and feet in the snow. Stiles did not drop his gaze until he was standing above Derek in his underclothes, shivering, nothing to protect him from the night other than his boots. 

“Move over,” he said through chattering teeth. 

Derek, reeling, stunned at the command, dumbly glanced at his bedroll and his torso disappearing into it, as if Stiles had not realized he was occupying it. Stiles made an annoyed sound and crawled in without waiting for an answer. 

“Take off your boots,” Derek grunted, as he was bodied out of the way and for the life of him, he could not understand why that, of all things, was what made it passed his lips. Stiles kicked them off, not caring where they might end up, and laid beside Derek on his side. 

“You’re good at saying nothing,” Stiles said, still adjusting himself, trying to find comfort on the hard ground, perhaps a bit too determinedly. By his erratic heart beat and leafy scent, one Derek was coming to associate with nerves, he was not nearly as confident as he was pretending to be. “So, don’t say anything, just – look at me.” 

There was no refusing him, not that Derek could, not with all of his might. He could go to pieces, fretting over what was happening or why. At this moment, however, Stiles was close to him. Close because he chose to be and that was all there was. 

Derek started moving as well, broken from the shocked statue he had been. Stiles did not recoil when Derek re-positioned him, hand flat to the small of his back, pulling him flush, arm going under Stiles’s head, hopefully to make for a better pillow than the ratty hay filled one Derek had flattened a thousand times over. Whatever Stiles had been expecting, it was not this, not to be taken in so readily or touched so firmly, as if there had never been a question, as if they had never slept in separate spaces and his surprise made itself evident by quick-shuttering eye lids. 

He couldn’t have known how touch-starved Derek’s wolf had been; Derek had not known it until this moment and he was nearly blind with the sensation of being woven into another person. Still, Stiles did not shy away from him, Derek could see the recognition in his eyes, the acceptance. The high heat of the wolf quickened under their covers, melting away the chill on Stiles’s skin. 

Derek did as he was asked and said nothing, his gaze fixed, unable to stray away from Stiles’s spots, his lashes, his mouth, the unkempt, grown-out waves of his hair. He had thought briefly that something like this, Stiles pressed to him, hands on his bare chest, would arouse him and perhaps it did in a small way, but he could not bring himself to feel that this was at all sexual. It was too intimate to be lustful. No bed Derek had ever shared felt this way, no bed he had ever shared made him feel anything at all. He swallowed around a tight throat and asked, despite his tacit agreement to remain silent, “Can I touch you?” It exited him breathlessly, blisteringly. 

“Your questions never sound like questions,” Stiles murmured, not meeting his eyes and then, after a few silent seconds, he nodded. Derek’s ran his fingers across the side of Stiles’s cheekbone, down his jawline and in the dim light he could still make out the slightly yellowed skin of a healing bruise. Stiles watched him guardedly. He had been thinking Derek wanted something else and he had agreed as if sleeping here were something that needed to be bargained for. It turned Derek’s stomach green. 

His thumb lingered on Stiles’s chin, holding his eyes level. There were not many humans, or any Derek had met, that were comforted by looking into the eyes of another for so long. But that was all Stiles had asked him to do; look at him and not stop looking. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lol hey remember when like 20 years ago i put bed sharing in the tags?
> 
> this chapter comes to you hot on the heels of me burning the shit out of my finger (my best flipn erractic drivers off finger) and six trays of confectionery for Darling as i have been informed that his day has been garbage. one day, Darling, when you read these words, i hope they make you smile. 
> 
> anyhow, man, we're just chugging right along. so like, LR is exceeding 100,000 words (uncut, lol) and the editing is taking the time that it takes. i guess what i'm saying is that the chapters will keep coming regularly but honestly this mf might keep posting well into February. 
> 
> please lemme know whats up, what you think, how you feel <3
> 
> my house smells like a fucking airport food court. 
> 
> ps. hilarious, literally about to hit the pub button and Fil brings in a lost xmas shipment full of Kirby Anniversary plushes. it is a good day. xoxo


	18. Chapter 18

Fever Hill was a much larger town than Last Rest. It lived up to the gossip Stiles had heard in the tavern proclaiming it the largest and most splendid city on this side of the mountains. It was here that the trading was done, including wares from the coastal cities. Whole shops were dedicated to books and stationary and chocolates, anything one might want to treat themselves to. Stiles leaned out the window as they passed the storefronts, many of them opened up on to the street hocking wares. And the people, he had never seen so many in one place or so many dressed so vibrantly. The constant chatter was like the swell of cicada buzzing in high summer. But he was the only one intrigued by the smells of baking cakes or the brightly painted signs. 

When he glanced over his shoulder, Derek was reclined in the seat beside him, nose in a book with a ragged cover and his sisters were gazing boredly into space as their carriage plodded along through heavy traffic. He turned back to the juggling fire dancers, twirling their batons and blowing flames from their mouths while children shrieked with delight. He was lost in the bustle, the never-ending stream of sound and movement, so entranced by the crowds that he did not feel Derek behind him until he was leaned out the window flagging someone down, hand carelessly balancing on Stiles’s knee. 

“What can I get for you, Sir?” asked a woman in a blue bonnet decorated with tiny white flowers. 

“A sweet roll,” Derek said and she reached into her wicker basket to trade a curled pastry glistening with syrup for a few coins pinched between Derek’s fingers. She thanked him and called “Good day to you Sirs!” after the coach. Derek settled back into his seat and pushed the roll into Stiles’s hand and Stiles was left confusedly staring at it, the pads of his fingers going sticky with running glaze. 

“You eat it,” Derek informed him, as if Stiles had never eaten a thing in his life. 

“I should think so,” Stiles retorted and took a bite purely to spite him. Sugary sweetness overwhelmed him and after days of bland meat and rice and coffee he let out a pleased groan. Elsie rarely had the means to purchase cane sugar and when she did she charged more money for her cakes and biscuits than Stiles could justify spending on something as short lasting as patisserie. He should have had the sense to savor it, but in a matter of seconds he had wolfed the sweet roll down and was licking his fingers clean. He found Derek watching him by the end, his mouth hitched to one side.

“ _What_?” 

Shaking his head and raising his brows, Derek leaned back into his seat and continued reading.   


“Our brother seems to be attempting a flirtation,” Cora observed to her sister beneath the frills of her hand fan. 

“Rather clumsily, I should say,” Laura replied. 

“Even so,” said Cora with a sniff, “I dare say his awkwardness has a certain charm.” 

To which Laura agreed, “Very certain.” 

“Perhaps we should not tease him, he’s beginning to look awfully embarrassed.” 

“You both think you’re terribly clever,” snapped Stiles, his cheeks heating. 

“You’ll learn to ignore them,” Derek said, eyes not leaving the pages of his book, but burning a hole through them all the same.

They came to Hale House just outside the sprawl of the city close to sunset. Life here had not paused in the absence of the Hales. There were a myriad of servants going about their daily chores, beating out rugs and lighting sconces and readying for their masters’ supper. The house itself was not grander than Mayor Hubbard’s own, but the restraint of their purchase spoke even more of their wealth. With such an ample staff running the grounds, Stiles suspected they could have chosen a manor twice the size and grandeur of this one. But Thalia never struck him as a flashy woman. She dressed well, kept things in good organization, but material objects did not seem to matter terribly to her. 

“Your mother runs a fur trading company?” Stiles asked in order to clarify some of what he knew about the Hales, which was not as much as he would have liked. 

“Yes,” replied Cora, taking his hand as she stepped from the carriage, “We’re fairly skilled hunters,” she said with a wink. 

“And all of these servants are also… like you?” he asked. 

She nodded, “There are not many of our kind with the resources that we have. Mother gives employment to any shifter looking to incorporate themselves into the human mainstream. On the condition that they behave themselves, that is. No late-night snacking as it were.” 

The ordinariness of the valets and footmen and maids was daunting for Stiles to wrap his mind around. He had not known what to expect from coming here, much less what to expect of other Woodlings. He had only ever been taught of how vicious they were, that they stole and devoured children, killing indiscriminately to get to their prey. But the Hales, despite their many quirks, were as normal to him as anyone he had met. Really, the only thing that set them apart was their kindness and if that was so, then the line between humans and monsters was far more blurred than he could have imagined. 

Miss Erica had been right; David Whittemore was far more of a beast than anyone he saw before him. The shame he felt standing in their courtyard was a spike through his chest. A snowball struck him in the shoulder, breaking him out of his mind. Cora laughed high and sharp at him and scampered away toward a woman standing in the doorway. The plump lady threw her arms around Cora and enveloping her in a hug that lifted her from the cobbles with ease. 

“She’s our nanny,” Derek said, having appeared silently at his side as people scurried around them unpacking the coaches and untethering the horses. 

“A bit old for a nanny, aren’t you?” Stiles asked, smiling up at him. 

Derek leaned in to whisper and his sly, hot breath tickled Stiles’s neck, “I should think so,” and then he sauntered off toward the house with both hands tucked into his pockets, leaving Stiles alone, his spine tingling.

The Hale girls did not do their brother justice regarding his flirtations. 

“Stiles, there is someone I would very much like you to meet,” Thalia said, once his coat and gloves had been ferried away to some obscure place. He could hardly keep track of the faces he had seen already seeing as the Hale household was really more of a small village in and of itself. 

“I was hoping to discuss my position if we had time,” he started saying, but she was already whisking him up the massive marble staircase at the center of the foyer. 

“Yes, yes, we will in time, but I think you can stand going just a few more days without ruining your eyes and posture sewing together our horridly mangled clothing.” 

“But to be clear, I insist on earning my place-,”

“Goodness, Stiles, I promise you can work yourself to the bone if you please, but for now,” she said leading him across the landing and into a breath-taking two-story library. They stood at the railing of the top floor, looking down across rows of work tables and study hutches lit by – if his father could only see this – electric lamps. The chandelier, one easily the size of a horse, hung above them, dropping into the open hole of the overlook also hummed with electricity, it’s pendant shaped crystals tinkling. Thalia brought him to the nearest table, atop which a white-haired man was reclining and smoking, an ample red brocade cushion under his head. 

“Stiles, this is Christian Lisiewicz,” she said and the man propped himself up on one arm upon seeing them, “We, as shifters, live in large family groups and appoint a single outsider to act as our emissary. Currently our emissary, Doctor Deaton, is away tending to some matters for me and Christian has assumed his duties for the time being. Most importantly his main responsibility is keeping our history and teaching all in our pack.” 

“Pleased to meet you,” Stiles said, offering his hand. Christian regarded it, dragging smoke from his neatly rolled cigarette, before shaking loosely. 

“Charmed."

“Christian will be working with you to further understand your gifts,” Thalia said proudly. 

“I haven’t got any gifts,” Stiles said, licking his lips nervously. 

She moved her hand to his elbow, “Oh, but you do, Stiles. The first night we met I think you recognized our wolves, I cannot say how, but you felt something, didn’t you? Some presence? We have heightened senses as shifters, we can smell and hear what humans no longer can, we can even tell a change in emotions with enough practice. And that night, I could sense your mind going into... - we call it the Wood. It is the place where our spirits dwell, connecting them even when our bodies are far apart.”

The Wood. Stiles swallowed, had he dreamed of that place? Had he been there? 

He felt ridiculous for even entertaining the thought out loud but pressed it from himself no matter how absurd he thought it might sound to Thalia, “The Fox – lives in the Wood.” 

Her eyes lit, “Yes! Exactly, as Peter mentioned, you are aware of the Fox’s spirit, it’s true spirit, aren’t you? I think that you are in tune with the Wood in some way humans no longer are and Christian can help you unlock that knowledge if that is something you want.”

“That’s very generous,” Stiles said, shifting from foot to foot, “but – I don’t want anything to do with it.” 

“Denying your innermost self,” Christian purred, “that seems healthy.” His voice dragged on the ears making him sound a bit like a tom cat if one could speak; the half curious, half indifferent weight of his gaze drawing the comparison even closer in Stiles’s mind. And Stiles had no response for him. He could bring himself to a place of understanding, or at least one from which he could try to understand the Hales and their kind, but not Fox, not such an impish, horrible creature. Fox had brought ruin to anything and everything close to him and it would find him in this place too without him actively pursuing it. 

“I’d like to lay down,” Stiles said to Thalia, his exhaustion finally winning out and getting the better of him. She was disappointed, but he did not think that disappointment was heaped on to himself. She might have thought his being in touch with the Wood could illuminate something for herself, something about her soul. Thalia had ventured into many circles of her kind, that much was clear, but knowing what he did now, even if it was just a glimpse, it was clear that parts of her were unfilled. She strove to understand while her brother lived opposite her, wanting only to live in the present and force others to do the same. 

Stiles wanted to help her, to please her, but this he could not do and it was a tightly drawn string around his throat to deny her. 

“Of course,” Thalia beamed, her face turning bright, but the expression was coerced by her sense of hospitality, “I’ll show you to your room.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> christiannnnnnnnn
> 
> if you've read Say It you might recognize the name. That was the first time I played with writing him in preparation for this. you know i have to inject ocs. it nourishes me. there may or may not be more familiar ocs appearing later. 
> 
> Christian is very much inspired by Hale Appleman's Eliot Waugh from Syfy's Magicians. Magicians (the show, not the book - i couldn't finish the book and put it in a corner to think about what it's done) is so frikn good I couldn't write fanfic if i wanted to and trust, babies, that i do. but there's no stones to turn over. i love all of it. I love margo and eliot's relationship; i cried like a weenie during the mosaic episode (oh i ship the shit out of Q and Elle). and there's no queerbaiting? at all? are they allowed to do that?? like. is this the bad place or the good place? I keep waiting to be disappointed and it keeps. not. happening. 
> 
> i just.
> 
> excuse me. i need a moment. 
> 
> Christian is as close to the Forbidden Fic as i am going to get right now. like with the Lafayette Reynolds character Baptiste from Stay, it seemed like it would get confusing to copy/paste across fandoms. not my style. so i changed as much as it tickled me to change to suit him to the AU of LR. obviously he's still a snob. 
> 
> please enjoy, comment/subscribe whatever feels right.


	19. Chapter 19

He said nothing of the bedroom’s delicate furniture and wide-open floor space draped in patterned rugs. It was not seamstress's room. Whoever was meant to live here was a well-bred person, someone beautiful and stylish and loved. Thalia wanted those things for Stiles, she had said as much to him more than once, but he could not bring himself to believe that he deserved any of it. What had he done in order to get to this place, to have buried himself deep within the Hales’ fortress? He had been in the wrong place at the right time. Thalia had seen herself battered and kneeling in the square, swallowing blood and she had saved him the way she had probably dreamed someone would save her as a girl. 

When she left him there to rest, he kicked off his boots, lay on the downy mattress and let his eyes drift closed. In the carriage today, he had almost been able to immerse himself in their fantasy, he almost believed he belonged there with them. No matter how he had arrived here, this was the future he wanted, wasn’t it? He was given a chance to begin again when he should have been dead any number of times. He liked to shield himself with sardonicism, but it was true, he would have died before long before he had been able to make something of himself; it was a matter of when. And now that he was here, what he had done to repay them? He had denied Thalia the one thing she hadn’t possessed the rudeness to ask for. 

He fell asleep, lost somewhere in the maze of those thoughts. 

 The winter set in heavier and sooner so close to the mountain pass. The snowpack built in around Hale House in dense, icy walls that kept the household staff busy scraping out paths and chipping away at icicles hanging from the gutters. Stiles watched them occasionally during his breaks between pieces through the frosted window panes of his mending room. The room was his to do what he liked with, and Thalia had perhaps hoped he would make it a parlor or study; something more personal than a work station. It was not that he insisted on thwarting her attempts to make him comfortable. He wanted to serve them, help them in the best way he knew how. 

The title of Hale was thrown on him in the random way fate liked to toss about unexpected hiccups, the least he could do was earn the name and he could earn nothing sitting around, drinking dry the wine cellar’s stores as Peter did. 

The servants did not consider him one of them and he had not expected they would, but they did nothing to stonewall his contribution to the household. His rooms were never up-turned, his clothes never hidden or ripped or soiled. Their indifference, as if his birth sign meant nothing, washed him down in a cool shower that left his skin flush and steps light. How bizarre to live in a place where no one seemed to care what he was. They did not avoid his gaze if ever they needed to speak to him, they did not chuckle darkly with one another as he walked away. He came and went as he pleased, went about his work, wrote letters to his father and even received a few in return. 

His father missed him. Melissa took care of him well, but it was not the same as seeing his son every day. Despite this, he wrote that he was relieved Stiles was gone to a better place. Last Rest was never kind to him and he deserved more. Stiles read that letter more than once over the course of the next few days; he took to carrying it around in his pocket because he knew he needed to believe his father’s words. Somehow, he needed to know that this was where he was meant to be. Ultimately, this would be his repayment to Thalia: the day when he would be able to awake in his fine bed and know that his family was waiting for him at breakfast downstairs. In the meantime, he would mend their clothes and keep things tidy until his mind could catch up with this new reality. 

At night he would awake sometimes, chilled to the bone, the fire having reduced down to a dull glow. His body ached in all of its corners and he remembered the feeling of Derek Hale against him; their uncomplicated closeness. He toyed with the idea of padding down the hall and tucking himself into Derek’s bed and Derek would certainly let him, though Stiles couldn’t say why that was or how he knew it so doubtlessly. But he never worked up the nerve. Derek was a mystery to him, one he hadn’t the faintest inkling of how to begin unraveling. He could not convince himself on any given night that he should attempt it. He had thought Derek wanted only to push inside of him until he got his fill, it was simpler to assume he was another in a never-ending supply of thoughtless men ready to do just that. 

He had not expected that Derek wanted nothing more than to sleep next to him in the way Stiles had needed to feel the body-heat of another person that night. This should have been of some solace; the door was open, he needed only to pass through it whenever he sought comforting. But it was not. There was a shadow clinging to Derek Hale, one that Stiles had misconstrued and regardless of his mislabeling it, he wanted nothing to do with it. Its root went somewhere cold and lonely and, in that regard, it was not so different from David Whittemore’s own shadow or his son’s or Halsey Smith’s. Derek might not be cruel, but hosting a dark spore, one that’s germinated under the skin – it would find a way to manifest itself. Stiles had enough creeping fungus of his own to scorch and salt and, perhaps it was selfish, but he did not believe he could consciously put himself in the path of someone as afflicted by this seed as he was. If he was cleansed of it one day, yes, then he might run to Derek’s bed, maybe even want to spread his legs and lose his breath to him. 

Stiles let his hands wander down his torso at the thought. He recalled Derek standing the doorway of his bedroom, arms latched over a bare chest, his rolling muscle, his long neck. This was why he could not seek Derek out. Because he wanted so badly to see passed the flaws and the glaring warnings that he should turn back. He lusted after a version of Derek Hale that did not exist; a version untainted by whatever wicked thing had fostered the toadstools growing over his flesh. And Derek may have wanted the same; Derek, if he wanted Stiles at all, wanted a purer form of him, a younger, unscathed part that no longer existed, if it ever had. 

The edge of the headboard bit into Stiles’s palm he was gripping it so hard when he came, air trapped in his throat unable to push out or suck back in. Cum spilled over his fingers in a hot, viscous spate, soaking his sleep pants. For a long while he lay there unmoving and unconcerned with the mess he had made of himself. He waited as his heart-rate died back down and the twitches worked their way from his limbs. Before he could let himself fall back asleep he forced himself to rise and clean himself off. The relief he had felt at climax was as fleeting as it had ever been, but it did lift away some of the day’s stress. He had lost a new set of needles somewhere in his sewing room and spent most of the afternoon turning over furniture to no avail. 

Stiles donned a robe and took his pitcher from the basin stand to refill with water. He ghosted through the halls, all of them lit by pale moonlight and soft shadows cast by trees beyond the windows. His steps were muffled by the plush runners stretching the length of each corridor. He had been skeptical of the copper plumbing in the Mayoral Manor, a rig that sprung more leaks and burst pipes than it could have been worth; having grown up muscling a heavy well crank he saw no need to improve on such a basic mechanism. But here, the sinks and extravagant porcelain toilet bowls worked silently and without complaint. He looked forward to the privilege of using them, of being able to turn a funny brass knob and for water to come shooting from its spigot. 

Thalia had invested her wealth in exercises of engineering that were barely implemented on the coast and, to Stiles at least, it was a wise expenditure in that it allowed the servants to complete chores at a breakneck pace. Each chore and duty here was so efficient that all were guaranteed time to spend to themselves or with their families. The Hales looked well after their own. 

The kitchen door stood ajar allowing for a sliver of golden light to cut across the hall outside of it. Stiles put out a hand to push through it when he stopped. Gasps and whimpers came to him from within, muffled, but there and a smell – he shut his eyes to breathe it in. Tangy musk and sweat rose above the old cooking scents. Stiles gently pushed the door open a bit wider. In the far corner, braced against a counter Peter Hale was thrusting, burying himself to the hilt into – Christian? 

The white hair betrayed him, but otherwise they both had their backs to Stiles. Christian’s head was bent, suppressing any noise that was trying to claw out of him, all of his weight shoved forward on to his hands, one thigh crooked atop the counter beside where they were planted. Peter held him, arm looped under his and twisted to grip his shoulder and steady himself, the other pressed to the wall before them. Peter was whispering something in his ear, words that made it all the more difficult for Christian to keep himself quiet. They moved together, pressed flush along their seams, in slow, clipped thrusts, most of their clothes still on but haphazardly shoved out of the way. 

Stiles knew he should look away, return to his room, but the scene in front of him held him there, unmoving just outside of the door frame. He knew what David looked like hunched over him and grunting, fucking into him and not caring whether or not he was causing Stiles pain. It was a disturbing, deadly quiet thought, putting himself in that room as a watcher, invisible to the Reverend and to his past self. And he had thought that was what it meant to be intimate…. He had kept his eyes closed because he couldn't stand to be present once it started and he and David's motivations no longer seemed the same; he had shut himself away, locked himself in a cell where he could be alone with the drops of pleasure he had managed to leech from their time together, but Christian…. His eyes were closed because of something else – not pain, not mortification. He was moving with Peter, not in spite of him, and their pace was dreamily sedate. Peter did not slam into him, racing to orgasm, he kept himself sheathed as deep as he could, pulling out only enough to feel the relief of rejoining. 

 They weren’t fucking the way drunks in the public house liked to make disgusting jokes about. Stiles had not known to think those people were disgusting until now, until he saw this. What he had experienced, the crude slurs and insults that had gone through his ears, none of it could be compared to this. He had never been touched the way Peter was touching Christian, touching him like he might just die if they were to separate for even a moment, his forehead pressed between the man’s shoulder blades as if they could become one person if he willed it hard enough. 

Was this who Peter thought of during those nights on the road spent reading or pretending to sleep on the driver’s bench? Stiles never would have thought him sentimental and perhaps he was not, but he had been away from Hale House so long, since before they had ever come across Stiles. 

Stiles backed silently away from the door and walked back to his room, leaving them to each other. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> twist!
> 
> not really.
> 
> thanks for reading! have a great week!


	20. Chapter 20

Stiles paced outside of the library’s arched entryway for several minutes, his sewing left upstairs and unattended while his mind scattered itself on a new threshing of thoughts. Without the tea prescribed to him for his nerves, he was more easily worked into a frenzy than he used to be. It was a bit freeing, being let loose from the corral of those drugs, whatever they were, but that freedom came at the price of struggling to focus when he needed to. He gave a distracted smile and wave to Lahey and Boyd where they are bent over a table a ways into the library. Vernon shook his head, but a good-natured smile was on his mouth the way one might smile at excitable children running and screaming through the house. 

Stiles smelt the smoke before Christian appeared around the corner, but his being there at all was still enough of a surprise that Stiles’s breath hitched. 

“You’re causing _a row_ ,” he said irritably, his smoking hand rubbing small circles into his brow. His fingers were adorned with curious black rune-like tattoos and silver rings resting at different joints. 

“I’m only standing,” Stiles blurted, jittery and defensive, though he couldn’t attest as to why. 

“You’re _pacing_ ,” Christian corrected flatly, his voice a purr and again it was hard not to think of him as a tomcat trapped in a lanky human suit. 

Unsure of what the response here should be, Stiles plowed on with, “I changed my mind.” 

Christian took his measure, eyes drifting boredly from Stiles’s forehead to the toe of his boots. “Why?” he asked and dragged from his cigarette. Stiles had not expected that he would need to prepare a reason for taking Christian up on Mrs. Hale’s offer. The reason, the true reason – it came from what he should not have seen, but suspected he needed to. 

“It’s part of me,” he said, and it was not totally a lie, “I should know what it is.” 

Christian blew unconvinced tendrils of smoke from his nose, but he refrained from calling out Stiles on his white lie. 

“Fine, go fetch me,” his hazel eyes squinted in thought and then, “an eye dropper, three eggs, a pitcher of water, a salt cellar, willow bark, salted fish skin, a bit of hog's hair, a silver knife, honey, three lemons and a bottle of bourbon from the reserve.” 

Stiles blinked a couple of times, as he was prone to do these days, “Now?”

Christian made a show of glancing about their surroundings before snapping off, “Yes, _now_.” 

Finding what he had been asked for was not the challenge of the request, rather it was trying to gather all of it together so that it was suitable for travel. One of the valets, Liam, lent him a rolling cart after taking pity on him. Christian’s strange requests seemed to be a frequent source of frustration for the staff. Stiles jogged behind the cart, worried that he had taken too long already and cursing himself for not agreeing to this tutelage, if it could be called that – he was still unsure of what exactly he had agreed to – when first prompted. Perhaps then he could have spared himself this errand, or perhaps not. 

He rounded a corner sharply, the supplies rattling and rolling and knocking into each other, but managing to remain intact and on the cart, even when he was forced to stop short. Derek’s hands shot out to stop the cart rolling him over, jarring Stiles’s gut in the process. 

“Derek!” wobbled out of Stiles, too stunned and embarrassed to offer anything more useful. He had seen very little of the Hales over the last couple of weeks since their arrival here. Thalia and Peter were engaged in a constant stream of meetings both professional and social and the girls, too, were off most days visiting with friends after their long journey. Derek was a noted absence and occasionally Stiles’s hands would still in whatever work they were doing should he hear footsteps in the hall or a knock on the door, his heart double-beating, but his anticipation was never warranted. And he never went looking for Derek either because each day he did not see him his mind grew vaster and emptier whenever he tried to imagine what he would say. 

Stiles’s mouth was filled with cotton now that Derek was in front of him, hair windblown and face red from the cold. And Derek gave him a startled smile, one without teeth. He glanced down at the cart Stiles had been frantically wheeling down the corridor. 

“Christian?” he asked astutely. 

“Uh, um – yes. He asked me to get some things for him.”

“He thinks it’s funny.” 

And Stiles was about to ask what he meant when Derek gestured to cart’s many odds and ends. 

“He’s not going to use any of this, is he?” Stiles hedged. 

Derek shrugged, “He might.” 

“Am I being hazed?”

“You could call it that,” Derek said, head ducking and smile growing as if he didn’t want anyone to see that he was capable of an emotion other than indifference. Stiles gnawed in the inside of his cheek. His mind whirled, hunting any place it could for something clever to say, something that might impress him, but there was nothing beneath the howling wind of his anxieties. 

“I haven’t seen you,” he said and instantly regretted it, sweat bubbling across his chest and brow. He had felt this horrible feeling once before as a child when he had spent all morning picking the largest, loveliest thistles he could find among the bedraggled weeds of his mother’s overgrown flowerbed to present to Lydia Martin. She had the grace, even at a young age, not to laugh at him as her friends had. She had thanked him and taken the thistles home and nothing had ever come of it. The last he knew she had moved to a far-off city, somewhere more glamorous where she would not be wasted. After that day, Stiles stopped himself fancying anyone the embarrassment was so much, and shortly thereafter, he learned more fully what the Fox would not allow. 

That sloshing, sick feeling was uprooting his stomach now, his knees trembling and heart stumbling. 

“I’m making you uncomfortable,” Derek said suddenly, smile erased. Thalia had said her kind could sense changes in emotion, but Stiles – plainly put, he had not believed her beyond a grain of salt and he could see now why that was a piece of information he was foolish to dismiss. What else had Derek been able to sense? Stiles felt his pallor drain. He had thought his feelings were his own when he laid down in Derek’s bedroll, but folded so closely together had Derek known everything he was thinking? 

“No, no you’re not,” Stiles stammered, trying and failing to cover his emotional tracks. Derek’s nostrils flared and Stiles could not say if Derek was aware of it; aware that he was analyzing the smells around him; trying to find a baring? It was strange, yes, and Stiles was not sure how to feel other than exposed, but he couldn’t shrink away from how fascinating the concept of it was. He swallowed and asked, “What do I smell like?” 

This was not something Derek seemed familiar with describing. If his people were shifters Stiles supposed there would be no call for describing a smell; Stiles wouldn’t have known where to begin to explain to someone what one of the lemons on his cart smelled like. Derek’s dark brow tensed and for a moment Stiles thought he had insulted him somehow. His lips parted ready to give an answer, but closed again, aborting whatever it had been. 

After a moment Derek told him, “Depends on how you’re feeling.” 

“That is a painfully noncommittal answer,” Stiles chuckled and Derek’s private smile returned, possibly aimed at himself for coming across as he had. 

“When you’re happy you smell like rain,” Derek said at a near whisper, his head ducked again. 

“…And when I’m not?”

“Bitter,” Derek said, frowning, but he didn’t elaborate. 

“I imagine that’s how most people smell when they aren’t happy.” 

“Depends on the person.” 

“Right.”

“Would you like to go riding?” shot out of Derek abruptly and he looked just as astonished as Stiles to hear it. He tacked on, “Sometime,” in what Stiles guessed was an effort to quell any expectation obligating him to say ‘yes’.

“I’m not very good at it,” Stiles admitted. His father owned a horse, but unlike the collection of steeds in the richer stables in the Last Rest, his horse suited a purpose. It worked alongside John and needed rest like any working person would. Stiles would run errands with her very rarely but had not learned to comfortably ride her faster than a trot and never took her beyond the trails between his father’s house and the town proper. 

After she’d thrown John and broken her ankle in the process, the animal doctor had been forced to put a bullet in her brain. He pushed the memory away. 

“I’ll show you,” Derek offered more eagerly than he had meant to. 

“Yes,” Stiles answered immediately, “I’d like that.” 

There were all manner of reasons he should have declined Derek’s offer and he would be delicate with their interaction when the time came, but all trepidation aside, the fact was that he wanted to spend time with Derek. He wanted it more than anything. It could have been Fox urging him on, baiting him into a situation he would regret. He had felt similarly when David would glance over him in church, when he would press the body of Christ to his tongue and his thumb would linger there on Stiles’s lip. By the time he was turning in to the library the heat and smile were gone from his face. 

He was silent while Christian puttered over the wares Stiles had fetched him. Silent while Christian mixed salt and water, murmured a prayer and then squeezed the concoction into his red-creased eyes. Silent when the rest of the items were squeezed and shaken and poured into a cocktail. 

“You wanted a drink?” he was sure he heard himself say it, even tucked so far back in a barren field of his mind. 

“Mm, yes,” Christian said loftily rubbing his bloodshot eyes and brandishing his glass, “ _want_ a drink _._ ” 

So, this was not the starting pistol of the next alcoholic gauntlet.

“Is this part of my tutelage?”

“Thalia wants me to tell you about the Wood,” Christian put blandly, setting down his drink long enough to strike a match and light a cigarette from a silver case he kept pocketed in his smart, mulberry waistcoat. Stiles could have looked quite a bit like Christian, close enough to be mistaken for cousins if someone had pulled him out like taffy when he was a child. Aside from his inexplicable white locks and height their similarities were concerting. Christian had the air of someone who had been cut and grafted into the Hale household, rather than that of someone who had sprouted here. How many people had been adopted as one of Thalia’s projects?

“Unfortunately, as I tried to tell her, many times, I can’t _show_ you anything. You have to decide to look.” 

“You’re serious?” Stiles asked, leaning back in his chair. 

“If you think I don’t want to help you, then,” he chuckled, a rich, dark sound, “then you would be absolutely correct. The Wood isn’t some grand mystery. It’s under that rugged-and-tormented exterior somewhere. I have every confidence in you.”

“I’ve had this my entire life and you are telling me that I just have to _look_ harder?” Stiles groused. 

Eyes wide and nodding emphatically Christian said, “The many secrets of the cosmos are tragically underwhelming.” Peter liked to toy with people as a cat would a cricket, bat them about until their legs popped off, but Christian, he took amusement in wasting a person’s time. It had been a mistake to come here. He had thought, naively, that understanding this _thing_ that morphed his dreams and stalked him every hour of everyday would bring him enough stability that he might reach for what he had seen last night. If anyone could help him, could empathize, surely it should have been this man. But he had left the kitchen a quixotic child and the world hadn’t any place for shiny ideals spun up from an empty and desperate desire. 

What did he know of what he had seen? It was an enchanting rose hiding countless tangled thorns. He had fooled himself into believing someone like Peter Hale capable of compassion; fooled himself into believing the man he chose to lay with would be anything more than a mirage in the distance. His anger flushed round and round with nowhere to go, because who could he really be angry with other than himself? 

“There’s nothing good in the world, is there?” he asked, and even that failed to denote any anger or sadness, only exhaustion. 

“No, there isn’t,” Christian agreed and downed the remainder of his brew, “but there’s also nothing bad, so…,” his eyes wandered, hooded with drink and smoke, “I suppose that could comfort you if you care enough to be comforted.” He extended his cigarette case to Stiles and Stiles accepted. Christian laughed his charcoal laugh as Stiles coughed for a hard few minutes. His retching attracted the eyes of a few people still milling about in the aisles, but they were largely alone. The cathedral ceiling was a bowl of rosy, winter light above them, fractals of it shattering in the cut-glass pendants of the chandelier. 

“Why change your mind?” Christian asked, “When you arrived here you looked about as surely as a fighting cock and this morning I’d saying you were almost _optimistic_. Glowing as if your chiseled, recently-returned-from-war husband finally knocked you up with what would certainly be _violently_ attractive progeny.” 

“I thought if I understood myself I could try to… belong?” 

Christian rolled his eyes, a frustratingly prevalent mannerism among the people living in Hale House, “My _God_ ,” he groaned, “Let me spare you lengthy rumination: in relation to the Wood, you are a cog in a very old, finely tuned machine. You could vanish and the mechanism would continue on oblivious to your disappearance. Either decide to _be_ here or don’t. You can spend years staring yourself in the mirror demanding explanations for your multitude of fracture lines, _or_ you can embrace that you are a ruinous heap of human garbage and get on with your life.” 

“Before you stepped in for Doctor Deaton were you the counselor here?” 

“Spicy,” he drawled, hazel gaze widened and impressed, though not a single expression or word from him came across genuinely. Speaking to him made Stiles an inanimate being, like a doll Christian was forced to speak to at the behest of a child. “I will say, though, that if you’re determined to stare harder into the Wood for Tally’s sake, the next time you hear Fox coming, don’t close your eyes. Try looking right at Him. That should do it. Or He’ll devour you. In which case, you can die knowing that your funeral will have an open bar,” he winked, swirled the brown liquor in his glass and in a puff of indigo smoke – he vanished. 

Stiles upturned his chair ripping to his feet, body coursing with fear. 

***

Christian reappeared with a crack of violet light in the hall just beyond the library doors and Peter was there, leaned against the wall, already smirking. Brushing down his lapels and coat tails  – transporting one’s self through the Ether did attract an awful lot of dust for some unholy reason – Christian said with a sniff, “That ought to discourage anymore peeping,” and made his way down the corridor, with Peter looking pleased and following close behind. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> get it cos peters a mfn wolf obvs he knows when he's being watched lol man cmon
> 
> chugchugchugn along
> 
> ahhhhh christian, the hero of good river
> 
> don't have much to say i guess. i'm still a little loopy from last week (Mr. Darling was sick af poor bb) and this weekend kicked my ass with its chores and football and such. *perfectly executed Boston accent* go pats. i'm exhausted. 
> 
> thanks for reading! feedback welcomed! have a super week!


	21. Chapter 21

Stiles’s spectacles slid down his nose as he worked tediously to repair the topstitch of Miss Laura’s favorite dinner gown. He had been told that a game of cards had gotten wildly out of hand the previous night and by the stains and faint but pungent scent of liquor beaten into the fabric this seemed plausible. He’d had to have the gown laundered by the washer-woman before bothering to sit down and mend it. 

Laura had brought the dress directly to him, rather than wait for her maid, Kira, to courier it for her and had said something quick and arrogant about needing it on hand immediately. And Stiles had taken it from her without comment, all the while sighing an inward sigh on Kira’s behalf. Laura Hale possessed all the trappings of a lady of breeding and none of the substance of one. She entered a room grandly, demanding attention and then would storm out of it again without a care as to whether or not anyone in it had heard a word she had spoken. 

For this reason, Stiles worked diligently, but he did not trouble himself enough to hurry in his task. Miss Laura would expect the garment returned within the hour and the sight of her wrinkled, indignant forehead when it was not finished yet would bring Stiles a rare ray of delight on such a dismal winter day. 

There was a knock on his door and Stiles called out that they should enter. Laura did not stand in the frame when he looked up; in her place, looking the height of consternation, was her younger brother. Stiles’s heart kicked a few times.

“Mr. Hale,” he squawked unattractively and remembered too late that Derek disliked being referred to that way. In his hands Derek held a bunched-up bit of white fabric, one of his own shirts. He glared at it as if it had stolen his spending money. 

“I tried to fix this myself,” he told Stiles, frowning still at the shirt. 

Stiles chuckled, “Why on earth would you do that?” And in response, Derek Hale shrugged, trying maybe to appear unaffected by the mess he had undoubtedly made of things but flushing to a rosy hue despite himself. The sight made Stiles’s ears roar; it was a ridiculous reaction and he silently scolded himself, ordering his thoughts to pull themselves into line. He held out his hand and Derek crossed the room to cede the clothing. He had somehow torn a long gash in the armpit having very nearly detached the entire sleeve and tried to reattached it with big, sloppy stitches. 

When and where had he found a sewing kit? 

“This is a white shirt,” Stiles pointed out and his thick brow quirked, nonplussed, “Why would you use black thread?” The question was only partly mocking. 

“Can you fix it or can’t you?” Derek huffed back at him. 

Stiles considered this before saying with a sly smile, “I can if you tell me how it happened.” 

“Doesn’t matter.” 

“Oh, but it does,” Stiles said lightly, eyes fond, bottom lip caught in his teeth. Derek’s gaze fell to his mouth for a moment and a dab of incredulity left his features, though he remained cagey as ever. He sat heavily in the other chair at Stiles’s table and looked unsure of what to do with his hands briefly before crossing his arms to settle the matter. 

“I was out running and it tore,” came from him eventually, the sentence sounding pulverized somehow. Stiles held up the shirt by the cuff of its barely affixed sleeve expectantly and Derek’s lips thinned to a hard line. “I climbed a tree.” 

“For fun?” asked Stiles. He was no stranger to impulses that came with being unobserved, especially out of doors, but he was for some reason shocked that Derek Hale gave into them. He seemed above that sort of thing, though as he thought it, he heard the misunderstanding of it. The image his words instilled, one of Derek perched in the highest boughs of a pine, clothing ripped and stained, wind drying the sweat of his brow, was fitting. 

“Yes,” Derek told him smugly. 

“Not chasing a squirrel?” 

“Now shifters amuse you?” 

“No,” Stiles purred, “not shifters.” When Derek caught his meaning, he dipped his head and smiled to himself. It made Stiles’s body hum; he had expected annoyance, not this, not a shared, private joke. He blathered, “I’ll have it done by tomorrow.” 

“Good.” 

“You can wear it when we go riding,” Stiles tacked on. His heart had been thudding along until now, sometimes roughly, sometimes nervously, but when Derek smiled at him without lowering his eyes or lowering his face to hide it and the tips of his teeth appeared, white and sharp and straight, Stiles’s heart stopped dead. 

He should be wary of Derek Hale. 

He should be distant.

He should be cautious and observant and objective. He knew there was something more to him, a darkened room where he kept the things that tormented him locked up and out of sight. He knew it. But as he lay awake in bed, staring up into the triangular beams that made up the eaves of his bedroom, he wondered for the first time if he really knew anything at all. He had built up so many towering walls and their foundations were buried in what he had seen and heard, how the people around him had treated him. There were barbs on those walls and no gates in or out. 

Derek Hale was secretly selfish and cruel because every other human he had come into contact with had been and Stiles wanted nothing more than to be left alone, safely within the keep those others had helped him erect around himself. It was such a basic, childish reaction and one he could not shake off. 

He should keep away, needed to.  

But he no longer wanted to. 

The stable, the proper stable (the Hales were in possession of two and a separate carriage house) was a ways from the house. Stiles trekked out alone to it, woolen scarf wrapped up over his chin and mouth the morning was so unforgiving. The path had been dug out earlier still, before the sun had risen, but was already filling in with a confectionery dusting of snow. Stiles used to wake before the roosters stirred out of necessity; in Last Rest he’d held several jobs, especially after John was injured, that required he be out of bed and hauling hay bales or cleaning floors well before five o’clock in the morning. And he’d been spoiled by the Hales since then. He still strove to serve them, but had found himself waking later and later, meandering into his sewing room sometimes as late as the ninth chime. 

Derek Hale was, apparently, not so contented to lie-in. Isaac had passed a note to Stiles, rousing him from sleep that morning while the sky was still a dark bruise. Half-asleep, Stiles had pulled on the fur lined boots and exquisite long coat and gloves Thalia had bought him – gifts he’d been flattered by and so proud to own he kept them on display more often then he dared wear them – and trudged out into the wintery dusk. He purposefully gave very little thought to how he had dressed himself as he walked. He had bundled up against the cold and nothing more. 

He was thinking so very hard about not thinking that had not heard the rapid footfalls behind him until he was being pounced on and buried face-first into a snowbank. Manic, high-pitched laughter met his ears as he sputtered and flailed, trying to right himself. Cora continued to cackle at him, rolling around on the ground like a toddler. 

“What the Hell?!” Stiles barked. He pushed himself to stand so quickly that he miscalculated his footing and slipped again, on his rear this time. He let out a long plaintive breath and did not attempt to get up a second time, all of the fight going out of him. It was far too early and he was far too tired to do more than sit. 

When she was able, Cora giggled, “Isaac’s told me you’ve an appointment with my verbally challenged brother.” 

“So?”

“So, I had to investigate.” 

“Is attacking me considered investigating?” 

“You looked as though you could use a good shove,” she told him, nodding. And in a strange, Hale-like way, he grudgingly realized that she had been right. “He likes you very well,” she added craftily. 

“I don’t think he’d appreciate you saying so,” Stiles informed her, refusing to let her embarrass him. 

“I’m doing a charitable service,” she said, crossing her legs under the long hem of her dress, “He’d never tell you himself or if he did he’d make a horrid mess of it. Did you _see_ what he did to his shirt?” And she threw her head back and devolved into a laughing fit. 

Stiles did get to his feet then, hot-faced and defensive on Derek’s behalf, “I don’t see anything wrong with him trying to take care of his things. You could stand to learn something, Miss Claw-Holes-In-All-Of-Her-Gloves.”

She made a face at him and before he had time to react she was on him again, tackling him to the snow with her bizarre strength and a harsh growl in her chest. He fought his hardest to throw her off, but she outmatched him easily until his limbs were pinned under her with no leverage. 

“You’re terribly weak,” she remarked; no sweat on her skin nor shortness in her breath. 

“I’m _human_.”

“I don’t know about all that,” she chuckled and leaned down to smell along his jaw. He tried to stay as still as possible, fear tickling, and then she was rubbing her cheeks against his and he realized that he had seen this behavior a hundred times in passing since meeting her family. It had never been done to him until now. He could see Mrs. Māhealani’s nose wrinkle in disgust. But it didn’t feel disgusting. 

Deviously, Cora gave him one last mischievous cackle and then leapt off of him and bounded away back toward the house.  He stood to brush himself off, but his whole person was caked in white, his lovely coat ruined before he’d made it to the stable and this should not have dampened his mood as much as it did. 

He watched Derek in the corral for a time, leaning on the side of the barn. To his sensitive ears, there must have been too many sounds around him for him to hear Stiles’s approach; trotting hooves, large, beating hearts, heavy breath. Stiles had not thought much on it until arriving here about how the Hales might interact with other animals. There were likely some that did not, prey animals or rodents or birds, but in that respect the Hales would be no different than a human family. The horses cantered this way and that as one, a small herd of four or five, all of them extremely well groomed with manes like women's hair. 

They played some kind of game insofar as Derek was chasing them and smacking their rumps when he caught up to them; if he stood still long enough, looking disinterested one of them would trot up to him and nip at his hair until he gave chase. He likely could have gone on like this for hours – probably did when there was nothing else to do – but at some point he became aware that he was being watched and hopped the fence in a single bound. 

For once, Derek’s chin wasn’t set. This was one of those rare moments that he seemed unconstrained by whatever usually kept him otherwise. He hadn’t cut his hair since Stiles had known him and it had grown out quite a bit. It was mussed from so much activity, dark and wavy and smelling like sweat, like _him_. 

Stiles stowed his hands in his coat pockets.

“Morning,” Stiles offered, unable to stave off the yawn that followed. 

Derek’s easy countenance faded and Stiles struggled to identify what he could have done in the past few seconds to have disturbed him. His hands curled into fists inside his pockets. Like he was advancing on a deer that might take off, Derek edged closer to him, eyes a little unfocused and Stiles swallowed hard.   

“Is there something on my face?” Stiles jabbered. He hadn’t time for a full breakfast after Isaac woke him but had managed to slip a biscuit smothered in sweet cream butter and blackberry jam from the kitchen before hurrying on his way. Cora wouldn’t have told him if he’d spilled on himself, the imp. Derek did not answer him. He came well within Stiles’s space; tantalizingly, inappropriately into his space. Inches apart Stiles heard him inhale a few times through his nose. 

Even so close, when Derek muttered something frustrated under his breath Stiles only caught the rumble of it, an irritated growl that raised his skin. And then he got impulsive, reckless; a burst of Fox’s wildness in his veins. Stiles stepped to him, filling in the stripe of air separating them and rubbed his cheek against Derek’s. His beard tickled Stiles’s jaw. 

When he backed away he did so awkwardly, lips thin and face patchy red with embarrassment. He cleared his throat, “Uhm, do – do you ride saddled or bareback?”

Derek stared at him, shocked. His expression changed quickly, going wickedly bright the way his younger sister’s often did, as if he could run all day without tiring. Which, Stiles knew he could judging by the state of his boots; they seemed to spend more time with the cobbler then actually on his feet. 

“Which ever you prefer,” Derek said, voice and eyes wily. 

“Saddled,” Stiles said, licking his lips. This conversation pretended to be one thing while speaking to something… else. “I don’t think I have the leg strength to ride without one.” 

Derek’s head ducked when he smiled, as it so often did and Stiles tried not to be so affected by it but it was far too late for that now. Derek muttered, “We’ll have to fix that.” 

“We will,” Stiles answered and they held one another’s gaze for a bit longer than was necessary. 

Stiles was given a dappled mare named Day to borrow for the afternoon; the stablemaster insisted she was the best trained and most loved of them all, so safe even a child could ride her if only their legs could reach the stirrups. To a person of Stiles’s particular uncoordination, this meant nothing. Simply trying to mount the poor girl saw him up briefly, one boot hitched where it ought to be and then he was off balance and flailing ass-first into the hard-packed ground. 

Derek, already seated on his horse with a hand caught in her mane, turned away from him, pretending to cough, when he was trying his hardest not to laugh outright as the stablemaster helped Stiles to his feet. 

“Ok, girl, this time,” Stiles grunted, reaching again to hoist himself up. His coat was ruined and his boots too, all he had now was what little dignity he might win back by getting himself on the damned animal. It took a couple more determined tries until he was in the saddle, mouth taut and out of breath. 

“Shall we?” he panted electing to carry on as if he’d mounted her the first time without issue and flicked her reigns for good measure, not caring really where she decided to bring him. 

_They ride through the afternoon. They race along the valley floor kicking up snowy sprays. They howl at the sky._

Derek walked him back to the main house, walked him back to his rooms. They lingered by the doors for longer still talking quietly, though Stiles couldn’t recall what was said even a moment after parting. He only remembered the curl of Derek’s body leaned on the door frame and how their breath mingled in the kissing distance between them. He remembered feeling himself grin in earnest for the first time in a long time. And later while he took tea by the bay window it still had not gone away. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> date night lol
> 
> thanks for reading!


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is NSFW

There stood three pools of water.

They were still as mirrors and the shiny black of lacquered bowls. In each, Stiles saw a different image, three divergent paths from a single moment in time. He should look away, he thought, not because this was a dream or because he thought these visions unreal. But because they _were_ real. These three pools existed somewhere in the Wood, three lenses through which the forest watched the unraveling of all things.

In the first reflecting pool he saw a dead wolf mounted on a pike surrounded by the kindling of a massive pyre that was still unlit.

In the second, blood ran in torrents along a maze of cobble stones and mortar.

And in the third, a house on a hill was a gash of red flame against the night sky. Common among these visions was a man Stiles did not know with eyes like coal and a mouth of gnarled, sharp teeth, the blood in his veins running like quicksilver under pale, papery skin. He was silver death; lye in a decanter of wine, silent and nameless and violent.

When Stiles turned, behind him stood a Harvestman and he knew it was the same one he had seen the day they came over the Wall, the one that had smashed its way through Mayor Hubbard’s house. Dozens of beady black eyes watched him, though it did not advance. He had no fear at seeing it here, could feel that it was not angered by his presence. It was blurred, a smudge of changing lines that could not quite come into focus no matter how hard he tried to see it.

“How does it start?” Stiles asked.

Above him the Harvestman’s mandibles rustled, rolling like worried fingers.

“I don’t understand,” Stiles told it hopelessly, but the creature would not speak more than this, more than the images it had already given him. And then it was gone and the pools too and left standing in the Wood with Stiles was Derek Hale. Stiles was drawn to him without having to command his feet and Derek’s hands, his capable, beautiful hands, dove through Stiles’s hair, his mouth and his tongue tasting like rose water. Stiles pushed him down, climbed over the length of him, trembling and gasping and kissing. And when he pulled away his lips just long enough to see his wolf, his prince, there was smeared blood on Derek’s lip, the dark hair of his beard matted down by the trail trickling from his nose.

Stiles’s fingers came away from his own mouth stained with it and when his eyes moved past them, found Derek again, Derek Hale was dead. Dead and no longer human, but a huge black wolf with blood in its fur and nothing in its eyes.

 

Stiles came to breathless, thrashing in his sheets. He toppled frantically to the floor, tears flooding from his eyes, hand cupped to his mouth to keep from screaming. He could shield himself from these dark apparitions while he was awake, but not while he was sleeping and the gates were swung wide and he _knew_.

He had killed those hens as a child, possessed by the Wood and his own buried anger, he had wandered into the night and done terrible things. And now he had seen what was going to come to pass and he was helpless to it. Derek Hale, his sisters, his mother, Peter; they were going to die. All of them. And the Wood loved them so well it had tried to warn them through its closest open channel except he didn’t understand, he couldn’t stop whatever it was that triggered their annihilation. 

Stiles hugged his knees tight to himself, sucked in air through his nose over and over but there was never enough of it; Derek’s blood was still salty and vile on his tongue.

His door pushed open and he knew all of the noise would attract someone, but he wished it had not; he couldn’t stand to live in both places, one foot still in the vision and the other here, in Hale House.

“Stiles,” came the voice of his would-be caretaker and it was a voice that did not belong to Thalia or Peter or God forbid, Derek himself. Bear-like hands held still Stiles’s shuddering wrists. “You’re having a bad dream,” said that nightfall timbre. And then another pair of hands was there stroking down his back, her long sheet of corn silk hair loose from its braid and sweetly smelling of violets.

“It’s not real,” Boyd said to him again and this time Stiles latched on to his speaking, followed the thread of it away from himself, from his mind as it collapsed in; a star dying after looking too hard into the endless night.

“Vern,” whispered Erica from somewhere above him.

“Yes,” Boyd answered quickly, “Stiles, I’ve sent Isaac to wake the doctor, you’re-,”

“Please,” Stiles croaked, fear lancing through him, “Please not the doctor-,”

“You’re freezing cold,” Boyd told him and as he said it, yes, he could feel the stiff, immobility of his fingers, the blanched, wind-beaten soreness in his face. There was water on the floor, everywhere, all around, icy puddles tracked in by his numb, blue feet.

“I-I was outside,” Stiles muttered, affirming it for himself. But he couldn’t remember leaving bed… when had he laid down to sleep?

“Stay with him,” Boyd instructed and his heavy boots pounded the floor boards as departed.

“I didn’t eat dinner,” said Stiles, pulling, pulling, pulling on his memories, peeling them apart.

Erica fixed him with a funny look, the sparse illumination in the hall putting shadows across her forehead. “You’ve been gone for hours,” she told him gently, far more gently than she had ever spoken to him.

“Gone,” he parroted, skin clammy with sweat and achingly, deathly cold. His shivering was growing worse, as if his body had forgotten how react to gelid air, to feet of snow and ice piled high against the world. Erica wrapped herself around him without a word, she could smell it perhaps, the wrongness of his body, its confusion. And he clung to her, her flesh burning white-hot in every place their bare skin met. Her temperature far exceeded Derek’s or Thalia’s or Peter’s; she was furnace and Fox was snickering on the mantle, its dry wheeze mocking Stiles’s own blindness. He could see the Wood, but he could not see into it.

“It’s here, isn’t it?” whispered Erica, her heartrate spiking under Stiles’s ear where it was pressed to her shoulder. She could sense Fox, the earthy-loamy perfume of the Wood, its rootlets reaching and curling into the room.

“Y-yes,” Stiles told her and he braced, took another nose full of her summery scent and glared up directly at the mantle. The hideous beast sitting atop it was half masked by darkness, just a mangey sack of pelt and bones and shiny animal retinas picked out in harsh relief. Stiles shook with cold, but now he also shook with fear. Fox was still as it observed him, its breath occasionally dragging over a grotesque puff of laughter.

_Can’t you see? Looklooklook_

Stiles’s heart leapt into his throat where it beat hard and fast, and Erica’s chest was drumming as well and… and –

“You’re pregnant,” Stiles breathed, tearing his eyes from Fox. She did not respond immediately, only stared at him. A she-wolf would know when seed had taken root; her mate would know it and her pack. But how could Stiles know such a thing? She had told no one; no, it was too early still.

“What does the Fox want with it?” she asked, stricken even to his eyes being blunted by darkness.

“Nothing,” came Stiles’s fevered answered, “Nothing. Please, I – please don’t make me see a doctor – I can’t,”

“You aren’t well,” Erica answered stoically. She no longer held him tightly, though, she did not completely back away from him either. Her head jerked upward at a sound that Stiles just barely heard, something like a slamming door, one that was very far away. “He’s coming,” she whispered and then Erica did separate herself from him and got to her feet, back straight and arms at her sides. Glancing down at his half-catatonic, half-trembling state she offered, “He’s frenzied.”

Stiles’s mind reeled; _Derek_. He wasn’t dead, the crooked-toothed man hadn’t come, there was no blood, no fire, Derek Hale was alive.

Footfalls crashed up the stairwell  and Stiles was pushing his partly frozen body to stand, hobbling to the door and Derek met him at the frame, eyes burning blue fire. There was no man in his gaze, only the wolf, only the prince in the Wood. He didn’t speak as he threw off his coat and crowded into Stiles’s space, stepped him back to the plaster wall without laying a hand on him. Erica slipped from the room, keeping her eyes low and away, un-challenging of the feral beast wearing Derek’s skin. Stiles should never have stayed away, he should have crawled into Derek’s bed every night that he was able, because seeing him now, breathing hard, flushed, terrified, it hurt more than the leeching winter, more than the sores on his tongue.

Derek Hale gave a brutal grunt, his nostrils flaring, his hands trembling by his sides.

“I don’t know,” Stiles told him, pleading though he did not know for what, “I don’t know what happened. I can’t remember.”

Derek’s head dropped a bit, his labored breathing more evident in the rise and fall of his shoulders and Stiles had never known him to be easily winded. “Stiles,” bit out of him. His glowing gaze scraped the floor. He might not have understood what drove him here or he might have known exactly why he was reacting this way. And finally, Stiles thought that he might know it too.

Stiles butted his forehead to Derek’s uncertainly at first and then insistently, demanding attention, demanding warmth and Derek growled again, a sound that was softer now, exhausted and worried and scared. Stiles pushed at him, more and more urgently, and Derek was still for a time until he began following and meeting and chasing Stiles’s face. He only tolerated this for so long before shoving Stiles to the wall, palm flat to his clavicle. He was trying to control himself and Stiles could see it now, that he had been keeping himself so composed, so in line that it pained him. It was not by coincidence that Stiles had not seen much of him in the past weeks.

His self-control was fleeting now, lasting only long enough to hold Stiles away from him before vanishing and Stiles felt something, some listless, waving piece of himself snap into place when it did. Derek flattened him against the wall, rubbed their cheeks together, ground into him, ran starving hands up and down Stiles’s thighs, his hips, pushed up under his loose night shirt and across his stomach. His delirium was a catching disease. Stiles couldn’t stop himself sliding, gyrating against him, hands groping, begging for heat and closeness, broken noises in his throat and then Derek’s mouth was on his bare shoulder, kissing and lapping at the skin where his shirt had slipped down his arm.

Death could not blow out such an intense, living blaze, could not take Derek Hale from him. Derek’s tongue made a burning line across his collar to his throat and there suckled and nipped until Stiles’s gasps were sobs, loud and honest.

“ _Der_ ,” Stiles moaned, words unable to make any more sense of the man’s name than that. Derek’s arms scooped him off him feet, held the backs of his thighs and kept him there, pinned between the wall and a pillar of muscle. Drunk with the feeling of it, of being wanted, hungered for, Stiles eyes circled the ceiling seeing nothing as he whined. Derek’s sucking turned to biting, sharp teeth sinking into pinkened flesh and Stiles fingers constricted, strangling his shoulders, but the pain was quickly receding into a thrumming, pleasurable sting.

Stiles murmured something incomprehensible even to himself but it drummed up enough sudden fear that he cried out, louder, “Wait! Derek, wait!”

And Derek was immobile, chest heaving against him with hot breath. Obediently he watched Stiles.

“We – we,” Stiles mouthed the word soundlessly a few more times, his forehead dropping to Derek’s shoulder. He was so fucking cold. It was making him slow, sending hard pangs through his limbs. “We need to leave,” he managed.

“What?” Derek billowed, lost and confused, his eyes glowing still with blinding blue light.

“ _Christian_ , I have to – to talk to Christian,” Stiles pressed. He disentangled himself and Derek did not fight him or hold him down. Until he was free he did not realize he had been braced for such a thing. He wanted to believe nothing could take Derek away, but something was going to – they couldn’t lose themselves yet, couldn’t fall so deep that the return was murky and impassable. He hated every burning second of it, of pulling away from the feeling of Derek’s weight, his firm grip. And Derek was receding into himself. Any hurt he felt was a flash quickly covered up by layers of black.

“You have a fever,” he said too calmly, following Stiles closely, but not hindering him.

“I know, I know I do, I – Lahey!” Stiles shouted. Erica was not waiting for them in the hall and he couldn’t blame her distancing herself, but Isaac, ever loyal, stood rigidly to the wall, hands folded behind his back. Shocked, wide eyes at Stiles’s dishevelment, his nearly translucent and torn night shirt, regarded them and he said nothing. Those eyes flicked to Derek searchingly, though Stiles couldn’t say and did not want to know what they found there.

“Where’s Christian? I need to speak with him now!”

“I don’t know –,”

“Where’s his room?” Stiles demanded upon suddenly realizing that in a house so large he’d never thought to going looking, let alone ask.

“I’ll show you,” Derek said, briskly setting off down the corridor and tugging Stiles along by his hand. They reached the door in a matter of twists and turns and before Derek could stop him Stiles was shouldering through it to find Christian reclining on a camelback sofa. Kneeling in front of him was a girl Stiles had seen tending the winter garden in the mornings, her breasts hanging bare from her unlaced neckline, Christian’s cock clutched in her hand. Both looked alarmed to see them there so abruptly, though neither of them moved.

Stiles gawked at them, a firestorm whipped up on the tails of his already thundering mind.

“O joy, they’ve found you,” Christian sighed, lazily swirling the brown liquor in his snifter glass.

But Stiles had nothing more than an appalled glare for him in response.

“We will wait while you make yourself decent-,” Derek said hurriedly. He was beat red when Stiles finally tore his gaze from the adulterous scene playing out before them. And before they could take a step Peter Hale was striding in, shirtless, decanter in hand. Derek froze solid, the scarlet of his pallor shifting to fury red.

He snapped, “ _This is where you’ve been_?”

His uncle’s brow arched, “You – dear boy, you do _see_ what’s going on in here?”

Christian curled his fingers in a sultry sort of wave. To the girl on her knees he encouraged, “Please don’t feel the need to censor yourself on their account.” Peter came to the back of the couch and leaned in to run a rough hand through Christian’s curls and suck in a greedy lungful of his scent.

“Anyway, Stiles is the picture of health,” Peter said and then he caught a true look at Stiles, perhaps for the first time, and his nose wrinkled, “Well he’s not dead.”

“Thalia is still out looking, the whole pack is still looking, and you’ve been _here_?!” Derek shouted and Stiles winced at the sound. He called her by her name rather than ‘mother’; doing so in front of Peter would only illicit ridicule. Peter displayed his annoyance by drinking directly from the crystal decanter in his fist.

With a hiss he observed, “The whole house is empty, have you any idea how _rare_ that is?”

“What do you _want_ ,” Christian griped like a child kept from his toys. The girl had gone back to her vigorous work as if she were not being watched, or it may have been because of the extra eyes on her. And none of this fazed Stiles as it would have months ago. There was something specifically unsexual about what he was seeing. With his feet and legs aching and his skin chilled still, Stiles had to fight a quick onset of exhaustion. He wanted to lay by the fire until he thawed; he wanted Derek to lay there with him.

Swallowing hard on the lump in his throat, Stiles croaked, “The Wood-,”

“Fire,” Christian said, eyes sparkling. His chest swelled when he gasped. The gardener’s hands were claws constricting on his thighs, her head bobbing more hastily between his legs.

“Hale House was on fire,” Stiles nodded, more than a little mesmerized by them. The air here was almost viscous with power. He’d misjudged what was going on and so had Derek. Peter caught his changed expression, one of sudden understanding no matter how fleeting it was.

“Sex makes a potent charge,” Peter said lightly.

“He saw it too,” Stiles muttered.

“What?” Derek asked his brow crushing down.

“He wants to look deeper,” Peter purred, setting down the decanter and coming closer. Stiles couldn’t back away and didn’t want to. “You are uniquely suited to help him.” His cold blue eyes went to his nephew, a smirk as much in them as on his mouth. “You can hide your feelings from Stiles but not from me.”

Derek lips were a tight line over a tighter jaw when Stiles looked back at him. Peter was treading impeccably precarious ground and for once Stiles could grasp what it was passing between them. Peter’s long fingers laid across Stiles’s shoulders and Derek growled instantly, though he did nothing to stop it, not yet.

“A truly chaotic force is on its way here, nephew,” Peter went on, “when it arrives it will burn this house to the ground. Christian’s seen the white horse of death but he cannot see more than his tarot allows without an open channel.” He gently squeezed Stiles shoulders, and said dark and sweet, “I know the thought of it runs through you like it does me.”

Derek lip curled, “You can’t force him-,”

“That’s not denial,” his uncle chuckled, “Forcing him would be pointless anyway, he has to be willing.” He ducked down enough that he could press his mouth to Stiles’s ear and still Stiles refused to drop Derek’s gaze. “You know what I’m suggesting, don’t you? You wouldn’t hesitate if you could sense Derek as I do. He wants to watch.”

Stiles shrugged him off, “You’re vile.”

“Apparently you do not know what I’m suggesting,” Peter huffed, more annoyed, somehow, than Stiles was feeling. Annoyed, but not embarrassed; that was where their emotions diverged. He was not surprised to find that Peter viewed him this way; that he would in every way other than say it directly imply that Stiles was Fox’s whore. Even if he did not mean whatever sexual act he had in mind for himself, the result was the same. Those Fox Children that gave into mania did so to suit purposes like this, or so he’d been told. If they did not outright prostitute themselves for survival, some fancied themselves oracles and soothsayers.

“I know enough-,”

“No, Stiles, you _don’t._ Do you really think my sister’s interest in you was based solely out of the goodness of her heart?” Peter scoffed, “You think that because we spent our childhoods tied to a cellar wall that she took you in to _spare_ you that pain?”

“Peter, _stop it_ -,”

“Oh, really, Derek just _shut up_ ,” Peter barked so abruptly Stiles flinched, “This has gone on long enough. Stiles, we’ve known about your connection to the Wood since I first saw you gutting pigs, we can sense it, _smell the ripeness_ coming off of you like a fertile womb. Thalia likes to convince herself that you came to us only because of our charity, but not even she can deny that keeping you close, you, an open door to the Wood, will repay us in spades. You know what’s coming; the vision you saw was so real you tried to walk to the forest _in your sleep._ If you want to repay her for her kindness than do this for us: tell us who our enemies are.”

Stiles stared at Derek who stared back, but for once there was no drawn curtain to hide his feelings. “Am I here because I’m like you or because I have visions?”

“Stiles-,”

“Is that why she asked me about the town that first night? Because she wanted her fortune read? She wanted me to tell her if your trading company would be profitable in Last Rest?”

This time when Derek said his name it came out of him like a beggar, “Stil-,”

“ _If I had told her she would do well would we have left at all?”_

“We like to keep a respectful distance from the Harvestmen,” Peter put in, dripping amusement that made Stiles’s hands into fists, “We likely would have left regardless. But Thalia insisted on nudging you in the right direction rather than purchasing you from your father. I was prepared to pay handsomely for you; Mr. Stilinski would not have had to work another day in his life. Could have hired a good live-in nurse if he desired.”

“And you knew?” Stiles asked of Derek, “Did Thalia send you after me after the Harvestmen came?” He wanted to sob the words, but no longer had the capacity to, “Did she tell you to make sure I made the right choice?”

“Not in so many words,” Peter put in, “but, yes, that was the gist of it, wasn’t it Derek?”

Derek’s mouth was unbroken and his eyes full. He pled with Stiles silently and if he were Cora, if he could be bothered to care at all about the muted plight of Derek Hale, maybe Stiles would have given him something in return. But he couldn’t. This was the darkness he’d known not to approach, and yet he had done it anyway. Derek wasn’t cruel for the sake of it, he was incapable of thinking for himself, of doing anything other than what he was told. This manipulation would have gone on as long as it possibly could have and Derek wouldn’t have confessed a word of it.

“I don’t care if Thalia told you to do any of it,” came out of Stiles, “If you had any feelings for me at all, you could’ve been honest with me.” And he hated with every strand of his being that of them all, Peter Hale had been the most forthcoming. Derek said nothing when anything but silence might have absolved him. He kept begging quietly, the cords in his throat stiff and fluttering and full of words that never made it into the room. 

When Stiles couldn’t stand to look at him a moment longer, he said to Peter, “Will you send money to my father still?”

“Certainly,” Peter answered skeptically, “I trust you understand what it would mean for me to do so.”

“I do.”

Peter glided away from him to jot down a quick bill of sale at Christian's desk. When he returned, he handed it to Stiles for his inspection.

“You may keep that until the sale in finalized.”

“My father won’t agree.”

“Details,” Peter shrugged.

Stiles glanced over his shoulder to find that Derek was no longer standing in the doorway. The entrance was bare and black in the hall beyond.

“Disrobe, if you would,” Peter instructed him.

Stiles did as he asked because he was hurting, because he knew what he was and was almost relieved that the fantasy had sizzled away to nothing. He had wanted so badly to believe it that any pain he felt now that he knew the truth was a fabrication of his own doing. He knew better than this.

Peter was clucking at the girl, shooing her away and she obeyed without protest, Christian’s cock falling from her mouth red and swollen. He ordered her to lock the doors so that there would be no more intrusions. When they clacked gently shut the eddies of energy lazily leaking from the room were brought into a close, closed circuit that put Stiles’s hair on end. Despite his own misery, whorls of vaporous power sent his blood coursing and his heart racing. It sprayed over his skin like a veil of mist, like fine hot oil. Peter eyed him ruefully. He quietly watched Stiles’s body swell as he petted Christian’s hair. Sweat dribbled down Stiles’s chest to his navel and it sent a chills through his spine.

Behind him the gardener had sunken to the floor, her breasts heaving with hard breath. She had been under the influence of this room far longer than he and slick was dripping down from between her legs. Braced back against the doors she arched off them, a greedy hand going to her clit while the other clutched at her nipples.

“Ah,” Peter said finally, “mustn’t touch.”

The girl mewled at his words, but again she obeyed. Still her sex spit glistening pearls until a dark spot of stained carpet appeared under her.

“Has anyone other than that cunt David Whittemore fucked you before, Stiles?” Peter asked conversationally.

“No,” was his shaky reply. He hadn't wanted to answer, but feared that not doing so might end in injury, accidental or otherwise. The incense and the heat were getting to him. How long until he was reduced to what the gardener was? Already his knees were weakening; his cock fatting with each passing moment, tightening and starting to wet at its tip without a hand being laid on him. It was Christian, he realized lost somewhere in his haze, that was doing this. Magic was crackling around him in a way Stiles had never seen it act in the presence of the Hales. He was more than they were, more in tune with the force that connected them all to the Wood and the Wood to all things. 

“Lay down,” Peter ordered and it stuck in Stiles’s ears like sap. There was only Peter’s voice, it was the only thing he was meant to hear. Stiles eased onto his back before the couch atop a nest of cushions arranged there. Dr. Hadley would have been pleased to see him so obedient. Peter knelt beside him and purred, “Spread your legs for me.”

Stiles did. As they fell apart, Fox was there standing and drooling, watching intently without moving a muscle. The starved, emaciated _thing_ it had been was filled in a little more, it’s pelt a little shinier and it’s eyes a little clearer.

“If you want to stop,” Peter went on, eyes taking in the length of Stiles’s body, “you must say so. We won’t accomplish a thing if you’re unwilling. Well, nothing productive anyway.” When his eyes met Stiles’s they were – fond. It was so unexpected Stiles felt himself go rigid. This was not a side of Peter he would ever see outside of this precisely controlled environment. The feeling of safety that swept over him was just as unexpected and unnerving as the soft, doting set of Peter Hale’s features. Peter laid a flat palm in the center of Stiles’s chest that he stroked down the center of him, making sure to give attention to his painfully tight nipples before moving on.

And Stiles _moaned._

“Your body will behave differently here,” Peter told him, voice rasping in his throat, “You’ve never fucked in the Wood. All that will be required of you is that you relax.” Air tripped out of Stiles suddenly when Peter pushed a finger inside of him. It had hurt so badly when David had thrust into him that he’d bitten through his lip and found dried blood down the backs of his thighs when he’d gotten home. “Calm down,” Peter muttered, rubbing small circles on his belly while his fingers worked themselves into Stiles. He was so tense that it took a few moments to realize that this was not painful at all. His eyes fluttered and his breath began to even itself out. “That’s it,” Peter said smugly, “The Wood will make this easy on you; It wants us to look deeper,” and another finger joined the first. He could feel it now, wetness gushing out from a buried wellspring.

“P-,” Stiles groaned, “Peter-,”

“You have to ask for it, I’ve already told you.”

“Please-,”

“Please what?” he teased and crooked his fingers in such a way that they sent sparkling pleasure radiating through Stiles’s bones. He sobbed out a noise he’d only heard animals make and his spine levered off its cushions.

“Pl-ease, Peter, fu-,”

“You have to do something for me first,” Peter answered. At this Christian managed to pry himself from the sofa. He got onto his knees and elbows beside Stiles; his limbs quaking. “Go on,” Peter encouraged, helping Stiles to sit up, “Go on,” And he repeated it with such reverence that Stiles had to look at him. Peter watched as Christian shivered, his hips pushing back in wanting; for the expression Stiles found there, he thought that they could have been in church or some place just as holy. Stiles forgot about his own needs, or rather, the artificial urgency the magic tugging on him encouraged.

Leaning into Peter for support he said, “You – said you never – ma—rried.”

"Did I?,” Peter replied and ran a thumb along Stiles’s jaw. He nodded Stiles on, toward Christian, he helped Stiles slip inside of him and this time, he did have the capacity for tears. They slipped down his nose as Peter guided his hips with patient hands. Verdant power poured out of him, into Christian, and it was a mistake that Derek wasn’t here with him; that he’d let his anger speak through him instead of his realer feelings. He was scared and disappointed and he let that chip away at what was beginning to matter more to him than his own well-being. 

_Fox lay under the ferns, curled into a ball._

_When he lifts them away, the animal stirs and it is whole: a young kit sprinkled with dew drops._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey birthday baabbyyyy (was russian doll not the tits?)
> 
> yes, there is a plot. it literally did not kick in til just now. for the longest time the WIP of this stopped right here and i spent weeks trying to figure out where the actual fuck it was going.
> 
> writing sex scenes is weird. editing sex scenes is also weird. my cat keeps making eye contact with me. 
> 
> thanks for reading! sorry derek's such a fuck up, but i mean, that's sort his essence. please feel free to comment and what not <3


	23. Chapter 23

One month passed and the snow grew higher. The house was decorated for Yule but would not celebrate unless all had returned home. They waited for the carriage to pass the gate on the hill for weeks, but it never came. A letter arrived late letting them know that they would be delayed again and that all was well. Thalia held the letter without reading it for a long while before laying it on her desk.

She called for Ms. Reyes and instructed her to take down the wreaths and garlands. When she was alone again, she laid her head in her hands.

 

Isaac had an exhausted rind on him that he couldn’t see but that everyone else seemed to be able to. The laundress liked to remind him of it. Even Ms. Hale noticed, though she said nothing, just gave him that forlorn glance she always seemed to have these past couple months. God in Heaven he hated it.

He wouldn’t compare the gloom settled on the house like a nesting bird to the place he had come from, but the same sorts of feelings worked up and out of him anyway.

He sat on his creaky metal bed and hiked up his pant leg. The rutting ire was making his stump ache all the time now and no amount of willow tea seemed to help. Doc Deaton insisted it was a phantom pain, not really there and his brain was playing tricks. Isaac’s brains were plenty capable of knowing real pain, but he’d bitten his lip about it. Deaton was cold and calm as a frozen pond – there was no use in arguing with him.

He unhooked the straps of his prosthetic and unrolled the lambskin sleeve Erica’d sewn him to stave off the sores he got from wearing it. As he massaged the dully throbbing muscle that was left just below his knee, Vernon pushed open his door. He hadn’t bothered to latch it. With everyone in Hale House shuffling about like the undead, he hadn’t seen the point in doing so. Some of the footmen and housemaids took to smoking in the dormitory halls and playing cards when the work was slow and the weather frigid. More often than not they came looking for Isaac to round out their numbers.

Boyd took a seat in Isaac’s desk chair and reclined like all his stuffing had gone flat. Without his pristine housekeeper’s uniform on he looked a bit like a used-up corn husk doll.

 “I heard it's been bothering you,” Boyd said, eyeing his stump.

Isaac shrugged, “Can’t do much about it.”

“How is he?”

This was the only reason Vernon ever came down here. Isaac was the only one that loved Derek Hale as much as he did. Except that Isaac was sick of all the wallowing, both Derek’s and Boyd’s. He didn’t dignify Vernon with an answer. He knew very well how Derek was and how miserable he was making everyone around him, especially the rest of his family.

“I saw him at the window yesterday,” Boyd said anyway, “He’s thin-,”

“You think that’s my fault?” snapped Isaac, perhaps a bit more fervently than he had intended to. 

“No,” Vernon said solemnly, “I thought he might have spoken to you. You spend more time with him than any of us.”

“Well he hasn’t,” Isaac snarled, going back to kneading his leg, “He don’t talk and he don’t eat and I practically don’t have a job anymore.”

Vernon gave a curt nod and stood from the chair. He left the room without any more chatter. He knew well and good when to stop pestering a person. If he spoke at all and there were times when Isaac wished he’d not, it was always so insightful. He got straight to the heart of things. It was infuriating, especially as of late. Not that it seemed to matter to anyone anymore, but Isaac had told Ms. Thalia not to meddle when they’d asked his opinion after that first dinner. He’d warned her and so had Master Hale; they, all three of them, had come to age as Stilinski had, be it in bondage or a locked room. She thought she knew enough to make the boy’s choices for him.

Isaac’s mouth compressed as he thought it, his fingers digging in deeper than usual. He laid back on his mattress, stowing all thoughts of the Hales for the moment so that he might catch some shut eye before suppertime.

 

“Should I bring up a plate for you?” Isaac asked blandly as he gathered up articles of clothing that had been strewn about the room. Sometimes Derek went days without changing his clothes and some days, like this one, everything he owned wound up on the floor or draped over the furniture.

“No,” Derek answered from somewhere toward his closet.

“We agreed you’ll eat once a day and I’ll not hound you about it,” Isaac told him. His bed linens were a mess. Gouges left by five fully extended claws ran the length of the sheets and there were feathers here and there, though for the life of him, Isaac couldn’t see where the pillow had ended up.  Perhaps they’d popped out of the mattress itself. He inspected the gashes to find that, thankfully, he’d not raked so deeply as Isaac had been lead to believe.

Derek emerged from behind the dressing screen, pulling out the cuffs of his shirt from his dinner jacket.

“What’s all that?” Isaac asked skeptically.

“I’m – dressed for dinner.”

“Committed a war crime against your cravat is what you’ve done.”

He set the heap of clothing piled up in his arms on the ottoman at the foot of the bed and made his way over to where Derek was glaring holes into his neckband before the standing mirror glass. Isaac slapped his hands away and Derek grunted at him but held still all the same.

“I’ve told you not to dress yourself,” Isaac sighed, tugging the cravat free altogether; if it had any hope of looking presentable, he’d have to start all over again. “Your hair’s awful. You might not care if your sisters poke their fun at you for being sloppy, but I’m the one who comes off poorly for letting you socialize looking like a hobo.”

After he’d gotten the tie-pin dead-center and steadfast, he sat Derek down and tried his hardest to drag a comb through his hair without giving his master a bald spot. He pulled a pair of scissors from his apron once he’d worked out the kinks. Still Derek did not fight him, though his face was hardened with petulance as Isaac set about trimming down all of the over-grown, splitting ends.

“It wouldn’t kill you to groom yourself once in a while,” Isaac muttered, “you’re a mess.”

“It might.” Isaac caught his eye in the mirror and the expression he saw there, for the first time in weeks, wasn’t completely desolate.

“You haven’t left these rooms in – really, I just assumed you’d die in here.”

Derek shrugged. Isaac hadn’t expected an explanation. He’d never known why Derek did anything that he did. Derek likely didn’t have much reasoning behind his actions either. He was tapped into Wolf’s instinct in way the others, including Isaac, simply were not.

“I’ve been told there will be company for dinner this evening,” Isaac said, “Ms. Thalia had a suckling pig slaughtered this afternoon for the occasion and a hunt is scheduled for tomorrow morning. She’ll be shocked into an early grave to see you at either, I’m sure.”

Once he had returned Derek’s hair to an acceptable length he swept it back and set it with pomade. Tucking his shears back into his apron and going to collect the pile of clothing Isaac said, “Change into your Wellingtons before going downstairs and try not to embarrass me.” He’d tried being soft on Derek Hale when one of these moods took, tried gently getting him back on his feet and it was all for nothing. Derek needed to be told, not coddled.

All of the tension went out of Isaac’s back once he was out of the room.

 

They had found him four years ago in the spring.

His father had crammed him into a barrel and nailed it shut. Ms. Thalia herself gave him the bite, but his leg was too far gone, the tissue already dead and rotting.

Deaton amputated the next day in a barn with no drugs, only a cask of whiskey and Derek Hale had held him down.

 When he’d recovered and learned to walk on his false leg Derek yelled at him to speak up, stand straight, stop shaking for the love of God!

“I can’t keep bringing plates back to the kitchen, Ms.-,”

“Where’s the paper?”

“It’s, it’s on the bar, Mr. Hale-.”

“Ten thousand dollars? For the mill? That can’t be right,” Derek muttered, crossing the room toward the morning spread Isaac had put out in the sitting area. He took no care to watch the splashing rim of the coffee cup as he went. “What is this?”

“Breakfast-,”

“I don’t eat breakfast. Someone must have told you.”

“Yes, but, Ms. Thalia says you have to-,”

“I think you're confused, because you aren’t speaking to Thalia, you’re speaking to me. I don’t eat breakfast.”

Isaac’s jaw screwed shut and then, “Yes, but-,”

“Are you capable of starting a sentence without ‘yes, but’?” Derek sighed, as he picked up a scone, sniffed it and then tossed it back onto the table; it landed dully somewhere on the table runner.  

“Mr. Hale,” Isaac tried and his skull lit up hotly when Mr. Hale cut him off.

“Just Derek,” Derek said to his newspaper, “clear this up, I’ve told you every morning for weeks that I don’t eat breakfast and for some reason it keeps appearing in my room. What is the point of you if you can’t follow simple instructions? Maybe Thalia can redistribute you to a groundskeeper or something. Someone like you probably enjoys being outside. You're barely passing anyway.”

“I’m, just – I'm trying to, I can’t-,”

With a disgusted hitch in his lip Derek glanced over him as if he never really bothered to take much of a look before, “Did one of those nails punch into your brain?”

“Just,” claws and fur and anger, “Just, I,” he had felt the new presence inside of him, let it out in the ecstasy of the full moon to run and howl, but he kept a safe distance from it in his mind. The Wolf sustained him from afar, sitting patiently at the edge of the woodland. It pulled him in now, and he shouted, heat in his eyes, “JUST SHUT UP AND DO AS YOU’RE TOLD!”

Derek stared at him for a short, rebellious couple of seconds before stiffly falling into his seat.

When he cleaned his plate, he went to where Isaac stood in the corner waiting to take his used dishes and put a hand on the back of Isaac’s neck. Derek chuffed in his hair, let Isaac rub against his throat.

 

Derek Hale wasn’t cold and difficult because he delighted in toying with others or couldn’t be persuaded to care about them.

 

 

They did not remark on his sitting in the dining room. His mother’s eyes were wide and then she smiled, but she knew better than to tease him. His sisters gathered in their seats without so much as giving him a second glance. Isaac poured him wine and gave him an arched brow, commenting on how strange the silence was. His family was many things, though not typically, were they completely quiet for any amount of time. Derek was content to sip at his wolfsbane wine without disturbing the delicate hush of the dining room.

He knew better than to allow spirits in his rooms, regardless of his state. Drinking alone would unravel him more than he could stand, not when he had responsibilities beyond his misery; receipts and permits and finances to keep in order for the Hale Trading Company. His work was all that encouraged him not to let go altogether and become a bootless profligate like his uncle. After so long locked away, the taste of wine was a welcome comfort, one he hadn’t known enough to miss.

“You smell like parchment,” Cora commented insipidly as she fiddled with her teaspoon.

“Cora, darling, how is your sewing coming?” Laura asked. Maybe she thought interjecting would spare Derek from having to answer. As if he required a reason not to indulge in pointless conversation.

“Sewing is fucking idiotic, sister-mine,” answered Cora sweetly.

Laura, nose in her goblet pointed out, “It seems everything you fail horribly at is somehow fucking idiotic.”

“Mother, this is why you mustn’t allow Uncle Peter to travel,” Cora said, “Sweet Laura’s head is starting to bloat.”

“If I hear one more vulgarity out of either of you, I’ll have you confined to your rooms for the evening,” Thalia said. His mother’s words were hard as the ever were, but she was only partly in the room with them. Her mind was elsewhere. Derek could have dropped a plate on the floor and even if it shattered, he doubted she would have taken notice. She saw him looking and he had to avert his eyes to his place setting. He knew he had the same tired, drawn expression and couldn’t stand to look into the infernal mirror of someone he loved. Not until he had gotten himself very drunk, at least.

The double doors swung open and in strode Vernon, his self-presentation far above what Thalia required of him, certainly in such an informal setting with so many rooms empty. He snapped his heels together and bowed before announcing that Thalia’s guests had arrived.

Derek forced himself out of his chair in order to stand respectfully. Vernon was so very diligent it felt fairly disrespectful not to match him. Two women entered the dining room and Derek’s eyes shot to his mother despite himself. He hurried around the table to help his Aunt Catherine to her seat. She walked with a cane and had done so since before Derek had ever known her. Her scent hit hard if only because it was so unexpected. One like family, but flavored by her home, the smells unique to the plot of forest maintained by the family trust: the Hale Preserve. She rarely left her cottage due to her condition.

Peter had been the youngest of the siblings and Catherine had sustained a permanent injury protecting him as a girl. She was not touched by Wolf as her brother and sister were and she never healed quite right. There were mud stains on the hem of her plain dress left over from her managing her rows of winter radishes. No amount of fussing from her nieces and nephew, servants or even Thalia could keep her from activity. She refused to sit still.

“Catey,” Thalia beamed, leaning in once her sister was seated.

Catherine waved her off and tugged on Derek’s lapel so that he would bend, “Have you gotten through the books I recommended?” she asked, terse though he couldn’t imagine what reason she ever had to be. He nodded. “Good boy, fetch me sherry.” And she released him. On the far wall, Isaac’s eyes rolled around in that way Peter’s always did, a mannerism they’d all learned from his uncle, to be sure.

“Whiskey for me,” said the second woman and he hadn’t been paying enough attention to recognize his cousin had accompanied her mother. She must have noticed his distraction as well and grinned at him.

“Gabriella,” he choked out awkwardly and they embraced quickly before Aunt Catherine could gripe that there was still no glass in her hand. Derek went to the wet bar, mind buzzing with static. As he poured he saw Isaac and Gaby exchange darting, shy looks that swiftly broke apart. Isaac’s shoulders stiffened and his Adam’s apple bobbed.

Conversation picked up at the table between the women and Derek used the brief diversion to shoot an expectant glance at his valet. Isaac ignored him to the best of his ability.

He returned to set down the glasses and then found his seat. If he’d not been so preoccupied with himself, maybe he would have been told sooner who was coming to call, or more importantly, why. It was too late now for him to discretely pull Isaac aside. Though Isaac had known all along, likely for days, what Thalia had been planning and chosen to say nothing about it and Derek couldn’t fault him this. He wasn’t an easy person to know, let alone serve. He hadn’t wanted a servant at all. Any time he thought of complaining about the assignment he remembered unearthing the barrel in Mr. Lahey’s cellar, one among hundreds that should not have stood out in a vintner’s stores.

Catherine’s eyes went around the table, marking the chairs that were empty and she asked, “When does Peter return?”

“Soon, I think,” Thalia answered as the first course was brought out. Even without having spoken to anyone in his family for days, Derek knew this was a lie. His mother could regulate her heartrate and lie easily enough to a wolf, but not to one that knew her well.

His aunt made a disapproving humming sound and then, “The moon will be reaching perigee soon, and it will be full. He shouldn’t have gone far from the territory.”

Derek forced himself not to whip around for confirmation. Had he really lost track of so much time? Surely Isaac would have reminded him sooner or later if he’d not suddenly decided to leave the confines of his room.

“Whatever would we do if Uncle Peter were brutally taken from this world?” Laura wondered aloud.

Before Thalia could pounce on her, Gaby asked sweetly, “Still clambering for a kiss on the head?”

“Really mother,” added Cora, “We would all be immensely better off if you had not breast-fed Sister Laura until her adult teeth grew in.”

“Mr. Boyd please escort the girls to their rooms,” Thalia ordered and ordinarily she would have shouted such a command, the vein in her forehead close to bursting. This was delivered so frigidly Derek pressed back into his chair with his jaw so tight it could have been wired shut. Cora hopped out of her chair before Thalia had finished speaking, but Laura was far less inclined to move.

Boyd came to help her up from her chair and she snarled at him. She stood so quickly that the chair butted loudly across the hardwood as she stormed out of the room. Gabriella too slipped away to her guest room, though she did so whilst concealing a fit of laughter. She did not feel the totality of the hierarchy in their pack if only because she refused to leave her mother to her devices in the outlands and Catherine, in turn, refused to the leave the uncomplicated peace the isolation of the woods offered. As a child Derek wouldn’t have dared find any levity in his mother’s temper; he certainly found none in it now as a grown man.

When all was settled the silence, too, filled back in. Thalia rubbed the bridge of her nose up to her forehead.

Her sister said, examining both Derek and his mother evenly, “This boy Peter’s run off with – is he really so valuable?”

Thalia’s hand moved to her mouth as she looked into Catherine’s dark eyes, but she said nothing.

“Yes,” Derek answered for her.

“You’ve taken in strays before, Tally,” Catherine said, her frown growing more severe than the constant down turn that her mouth was normally set to, “And they’ve come and gone without so much as a glance. And now I’d think this house were a funeral home if I didn’t know better.”

 Thalia admitted, “I lied to him.” He had never heard his mother say so out loud and it struck him hard. She held Derek’s gaze for a moment before saying, “It’s my fault you’ve been separated, puppy. I shouldn’t have used either of you.”

Derek jolted upright from the table, his movement sending a clatter through the dishes. He had thought he had crushed his anger. Isolating himself for so long should have freed him of its restraints; what a fool – what a fucking fool – he was.

“ _I listened to you_ ,” he seethed, but what was just as true was that he’d not questioned her and so really, Thalia Hale was not the only one to blame. There was nothing she had forced him to. A different alpha in her place would have done just that; if she had it would have been so easy to pin all of his regrets, his un-drained anger to her. 

Catherine’s eyes narrowed, “You have feelings for this boy, _Derek_?” That tone used to send a shiver down his spine when he was young. He stood fast regardless, his hands pulled into fists. “I see,” she persisted, “And rather than tell this young man how you felt, rather than protect him against what you thought might harm him, what did you _do_?”

_If you had any feelings for me at all, you could’ve been honest with me._

Thalia tried, “Catey, he-,”

“No. You have both made a mess of things,” Catherine growled, “But I want _him_ to say it. Derek, you’ve always been a good boy, but you are a pigheaded, stubborn ass when you’re frightened and make no mistake, this young man has frightened you. I do not need to have met him to know, it’s so obvious by your behavior. Thalia should not have tried to manipulate him, even if her intentions are good and you should have stood up for yourself for _once_. If you love that boy, you shouldn’t have allowed this to go so far as it did. Now tell me, when your mother asked you to keep watch on him, what did you do?”

He was like Thalia, both in the room and not, his mind hardening, trying desperately to wall itself off from them. Who was she to demand answers from him? They weren’t really answers she was after; she wanted him to humiliate himself for the sake of her own rigid moral superiority.

“I’ve struck a nerve,” Catherine said when his eyes glowed blue.

“Catherine, you’re being cruel-,” Thalia tried.

“I’m not, you’ve been too gentle. Both of you are damned martyrs when no one’s asked you to be. For God’s sake, boy, I am _not_ attacking you. No wonder you’re so violently introverted when no one in this goddamn family will just speak plainly. You’ve done a bad thing Derek. Accept it. It is done. But perhaps you’re most egregious mistake was letting this boy leave without mending what you have broken. Do you think I spent my days wallowing when Gaby’s father abandoned us? I had known it was possible she could be born a wolf and I prayed every night that she would be human, that I would not have to lose him because of my omissions.

“I am to this day ashamed of my behavior, but it was mine and all I am left with is to own my decisions. I pursued that man to the end of the earth. I threw myself at his feet and he still would not have us. He may have always have reacted in that way, even if I had been honest from the beginning, but that was the situation I had created for myself. And after I had his answer I moved on with my life. The bed you’ve made for yourself is not so different from my own, now lie in it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aunt catherine's here for a smack down. 
> 
> and gaby returns. she didn't get a lot of development in Stay, mostly because her character spent the whole thing mentally/emotionally convalescing, so she'll have a deeper role in LR. maybe im just secretly lazy and don't feel like coming up with new ocs. maybe i'm the hamburgular.
> 
> hope you have enjoyed this update, i have enjoyed writing it. thank you for sticking with me. feedback welcomed


	24. Chapter 24

Gaby sat in Thalia’s parlor drinking tea with a stiff pinky finger if only because it seemed to greatly amuse Mr. Lahey and greatly annoy Miss Laura. Her aunt so easily took pity on her children. None of them were allowed to sit for dinner – because they could scarcely sit in civility for more than a couple of minutes no matter the setting – but they were invited down when the plates were cleared away for coffee and cake. Not much of a lesson learned. They were all so preoccupied with being wolves and none of them interested in being human, except for Thalia. It was by her example any of them bothered to dress as they did or eat from china and silver and crystal. She was the reason they lived in a house at all.

This was why, other than to monitor her mother’s health, Gabriella chose not to live among her cousins. Her mother had urged her to go and learn, but Thalia was not interested in teaching her the ways of their kind. She taught her children how to exist alongside mortals; how to pretend and speak as they did. Pointless.

“Your ensemble is so – functional, cousin,” observed Laura.

“Can’t very well dig up hares with a steel cage tied to my waist,” Gaby answered.

“It's rabbit blood,” Cora said, nodding, having been given the answer to a puzzle she’d long been trying to crack, “I couldn’t place it.”  She reached out for Gaby’s wrist and she gave it so that Cora could take in the scent from the dark stain on her sleeve.

Gaby gave a pointed look to Thalia, but Thalia was as distracted as she had been. Catherine had settled on a settee beside her, sipping hot coffee and fanning herself with an elaborate peacock feather folding fan. Beyond them snow was falling in large cottony wads outside the bay window. Together the sisters formed one person while Thalia was too distraught to be whole on her own. That, perhaps, was why Mother had excepted the invitation to dinner. The moon pushed them together when She came so close to the world, but, truly, the longer Gaby watched them, the more obvious it was that the moon was only an excuse that allowed them both to come together without bruising their fragile prides.

“Warrens are easy enough to find in the snow,” Gaby said, tearing away her gaze, “I’ll show you in the morning.”

“Yes, I’d like that.”

“With you here, Gabriella, I’m sure we won’t need to order grocery for a month,” Laura sighed.

“Should I be insulted that I’m a decent provider when you hardly know the ass-end of a pheasant from its front?”

Laura looked as though she were going to retort in some insufferable way when, collectively, they heard the unmistakable slam of the eastern stable doors being thrown open too wide by the wind. The clatter was so loud that Gaby suspected even a human might have heard it from indoors. The stable hands were rushing through knee-deep snow to shut them again, their voices a dull, indistinct rumble under the whipping weather. And then, hooves thundering past the house toward the gate on the hill. They listened until the shod drumbeat faded away.

Thalia grasped Catherine’s wrist, but she said nothing still, her pallor having gone deathly pale.

“Mr. Lahey,” Mother said, unaffected, “I think we are in need of a rather strong pousse-café.”

Isaac bowed and went from the room to assemble their drinks. If he knew enough, he’d bring a bottle of something potent back with him so that when their delicate layered cordials were spent, they could discretely refill their glasses until their worry was too far gone to recall what it had been so busy fretting over. Increasingly, Gaby found that he knew quite a bit.

 

She and Derek used to make a game of slinking through the house at night. He taught her how to use other sounds like settling creaks or jumping shutters to mask her movements from their parents. Gaby had once broken a finger trying to out-maneuver their uncle on a night none of them could sleep. She tip-toed, skirting the less tread upon floor near to the molding, walked on furniture that could still bear her weight. It had been far easier to prance about in the darkness as a child.

She stood in Derek’s doorway. The bed was still made and empty. No sounds or smells were out of place though they had faded in his absence. It was too bad that he should leave her here to play alone. The hairs on the nape of her neck prickled. Somewhere in the room beyond her, Wolf stopped its rooting through Derek’s things. In her periphery she saw the nocturnal glow of its alert eyes. She heard dully the light snores of her family, scattered in their rooms. Laura was the only one choosing to sleep alone; the others were piled in Thalia’s grand suite, kicking when dreams spun up and snuffling into their sheets. But not everyone was asleep. There was a hint of tart-sweetness in the air, like black cherries on their branch, and layered with it: polish and laundry soap.

Gaby crouched and eased her heart rate to a muffled thudding that one would have to be standing next to her to hear. This she had not learned this from Derek, but from Wolf, Herself. Her mother had so few visitors that the wood surrounding her cottage was bold still, sporting a wily temper like it’s cousin beyond that infernal Wall. If a person was patient, there was quite a bit it had to teach.

He stopped moving toward her, for to him she had vanished from his senses like a ghost gone through the walls. So close to Derek’s room, to his bed saturated with his earthy scent she blended into the hall as if she were a piece of decoration. He kept moving, more slowly now, a tinge of nerves clinging to his skin. When he’d padded close enough to her, Gaby sprang on him and wrestled him to the floor.

Isaac yelped before wind gushed from his lungs. The tray he had been carrying rolled away and bounced loudly off the nearest end table. She straddled him before he could pose much of a resistance and pinned his arms. Grinning, she whispered, “You’re a good wolf Isaac Lahey.”

“You shouldn’t make a habit of ambushing the disabled.”

He was testing her hold and finding that it would not budge. He sighed, melancholic as ever, and stopped trying to free himself when it became apparent that prying himself loose would require more energy than he was willing to spend.

She had meant to ask him where her cousin had run off to in a blizzard under cover of night but reconsidered now that she had him restrained. Everyone who lived and worked on the grounds must have come to him looking for Derek Hale at one time or another, certainly now that he’d become more of a recluse than he’d been previously (something she had not thought possible). Who would have sought him out just to speak with him otherwise?

“Mother says I have a lot of bad habits,” Gaby said in agreement.

“Why are you out of bed? Miss Catherine’ll skin you if she catches you.”

“Restless,” she said with a shrug and let go of his wrists so that she could sit straight and stretch her shoulders. This house was a cavity, not so different from the burrows she’d unearthed at dawn, except this one was above the ground; endless twists and turns and cubbies to hide in. It made her flesh crawl to be trapped inside for so long. She’d known Derek had taken flight but had wanted to see for herself that his room was vacant and there was no one to prowl the halls with.

Isaac propped himself up onto one arm and ran his fingers through his dense head of curls.

“The moon?” he asked.

A bit, maybe. But no, it was not just the fattening moon that plucked at her strings. There was something larger, closer than the moon that was making her blood rush. She supposed that may have been why Derek had run off; Wolf sometimes told him things that She never bothered to tell her, no matter how often they spoke. As Gaby and her mother passed through Fever Hill and the shops were readying to close down for the evening, there had been a briskness in the air that had nothing to do with the cold. It was a feeling like touching frozen metal, one that burned straight through.

“I think something is coming,” she confided. It was against Mother’s wishes that she speak of Wolf or the gifts Wolf occasionally gave her. Those around her would be too tempted to exploit her connection, even her Aunt Thalia, as it had turned out. She had believed her mother thinly, as all children believed their parents even when they gave no evidence. Now – now she hated the knowing look she’d gotten when Catherine had received word of the whole affair with the Fox Child from Last Rest. She hated that Thalia hadn’t been strong enough to resist the Four’s power, even if the boy she’d found was scarcely cognoscente of his abilities.

Isaac’s wide blue eyes narrowed, but not out of anger. He asked, “What do you mean?”

“I’ve had a foreboding.”

Isaac snorted a disbelieving laugh and laid back down, one arm crooked under his head as a cushion.

“Promise me you will run away,” she said sternly, clutching his shirt front so that he was forced to look at her.

“From what?” he asked flatly.

“The man with crooked teeth.”

“You’ve described most of the town.”

“You’ll know.”

“You enjoy confusing people with nebulous statements?”

“No,” she huffed, but how else could she be expected to describe the feelings she found in the Wood? It did not speak in terms as limiting as words. It saw the spool of the world un-thread, it was the force which caused it to unravel. There were too many pathways for the yarn to pull apart, infinite possibilities that could not be condensed down into a single absolute. In the weave of it she had seen too many outcomes to know which was truest, but there were many that ended in horrors. There were also many that ended with her saving pieces of those that might be swept away in the next pass of the loom’s shuttle.

She pulled her shirt up and over her head and cast it away. Isaac stared at her, his body having suddenly tensed.

“What are –,” he sputtered.

“You are a good wolf Isaac Hale,” she said again, and leaned down to kiss him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeehaw
> 
> hope you've enjoyed reading. thank you for choosing monstrously far-fetched airlines.


	25. Chapter 25

Dr. Martin lingered by the butcher’s cart a while longer as the black gates of Last Rest were unsealed. A crowd had been drawn by the sound and gathered around the widening crack all dressed in their dark winter cloaks; a cloud of hushed murmuring settling over them. It was early still, too early for the gates to open, but this was not a winter like all the others. Snow had yet to pile more than a foot over the new graves dug and filled in the old church cemetery. She waited for whom ever was on the other side, if anything expecting an ox driven cart loaded down with limestone slabs ready for engraving, or perhaps charity of some kind from the other mountains towns to aid them through the remaining cold months.

A black carriage, unmarked, glided into the square. One or two gray-hairs scowled and spit on the passing wheels.

“Monkshood,” whispered Hayden, at her side, her hand falling on Dr. Martin’s arm and giving it a light squeeze. She closed her eyes and pulled in a long breath, “And metal and gun powder.”

The base of Martin’s skull smarted for a moment, the familiar pang spreading like ink in water and reaching all the way to her temples. And then, strangely, there was nothing; no pain at all. The whispers in the Wood faded from her ears entirely. So jarring was the absence of the constant drone of Death’s muttering Lydia felt it like a blow. She blinked hard, her fingers grazing her forehead and Hayden was speaking quickly and quietly, but she ignored her.

“ _Shut up_ ,” she bit off when she was able, her agitated gaze returning to the coach waiting still, its white horses breathing hard after so long stomping through the drifts.  Only a madman would drive horses through this weather. The roads and trails weaving through the foothills had not been cleared. The beasts would be dead by morning even if they were bought to a warm barn in the next couple of minutes. And as Dr. Martin thought it, there was a commotion in the square; voices and braying blended together into a pitchy chorus of screams as one of the pale horses collapsed, dragging down its rigging and the creature tethered in beside it.

The driver was out of his seat and a footman that looked all but frozen to his post at the rear of the coach leapt down to try and right the horses. But they were ineffectual, too cold to bend or stand and they looked around deliriously at the villagers for help only to find none.  The footman tried still to undo the straps with brittle fingers; the driver, however, sunk to the cobbles, sitting with both legs out in front of him with his head hung.

“Go home,” Dr. Martin whispered to Hayden.

There was enough of a crowd watching this bizarre scene unfold that Hayden could slip away unnoticed and she did. A man off to Martin’s right began to bawl. He could not have known, but his tears were pointless. The Wood would not punish them for this. These strangers though – they’d not find asylum here.

The door of the coach swung open and a woman stepped out dressed in furs and leather armor, weapons strewn about her person and her wheaten hair tied neatly down her back.

Lydia’s hand fell to her chest where her heart was clanging.

When the woman spoke, her voice was not her own. It was death’s voice, the reason all other nettling whispers had fallen away.

“I am looking for David Whittemore,” the woman shouted. Some flinched. The rest watched her with ghosts’ eyes. The woman’s lethal gaze went through the crowd, her impatient scowl deepening. “I was summoned,” she yelled, “by your Reverend David Whittemore. He informs me that you have a crazed fox on your hands. I am here to skin it.”

From somewhere in the throng came, “Fox can’t be killed.”

And the woman smirked, her voice softening, “We shall see.”

Jackson Whittemore pushed his way to the front, making a show as if he’d only just arrived, but Dr. Martin knew better. Like many of them, she supposed, he had wanted to see what the intruder would do. He was a fool to go to her now, thinking certainly that she posed no threat to him.

“My father’s taken ill,” he said strongly. He was clean shaven and well dressed, but Last Rest was so far into the winter and rations were spread so thin that not even his bulky clothing could hide how gaunt he had become. Among them, only Mayor Hubbard maintained a healthy complexion and only because he’d been fat as a round, summer squash his entire life. “He’d never summon anyone during the Offering.”

The woman took a folded piece of paper from her cloak and held it high, addressing not Jackson, but the entirety of the gathering. “This letter came to me not more than a month ago; written in your reverend’s own hand and sealed with his seal. I know you have been visited by the Harvestmen. I know that many died during their incursion. These beasts beyond the Wall and their half-breed mongrels living among you are not dark spirits – they are flesh and blood and I have come to purge your town of its infestation.”

“You think no one’s tried?” piped up Halsey Smith, a mocking scoff to his words, “Who do you think you are, Van fucking Hellsing?”

The woman turned her horrible smile on him, “Sweetheart,” she purred, “this whole continent once belonged to the Wood. It stretched all the way to the sea. Together we pushed it beyond the mountains, built and rebuilt our Walls. That,” she said a little louder thrusting a finger at the top of the Wall where it rose above the furthest buildings, “is not the first Wall to ever stand. And the time has come to push it back again, claim the entire valley beyond. My people have been living among you. This town and every Wall Town is overrun with spies for the Forest. They move against you even now.”

A couple of men erupted from the crowd and threw Hayden down into the square before the woman. Lydia’s feet planted to the snow packed ground, her features threatening to crack. She let the dread drop through her, let her eyes close for just a moment, just long enough to feel the full extent of her horror. She remembered the humid, smoky cabin on the edge of town, the fire filling the room to its brim with heat against the chill outside and her parents settled in their chairs talking quietly beside it.

_If it doesn’t end in Last Rest, it doesn’t end at all._

“Some of us have lived among you far longer than you know,” said the woman, circling Hayden, eyes raptorial and fixed, “generations even; watching. The Wood’s tactics always change. Every time we are nearly overcome, we retreat, a Wall is built and we wait. Ours is a war of inches. The only way to win is to be more patient than the Wood itself.” She squatted in front of Hayden, brushed a few stray curls behind her ear; Hayden stared at the ground trembling and not daring to move. “But still our first strike never changes,” said the woman, barely audible, “we can’t have you watching the watchers.”

Lydia tried with all her might to suppress the scream mounting in her chest. It cut the air, shrill and earsplitting, deafening as musket-fire to those closest to her. They dove to cover their ears leaving her standing, braced against the butcher’s cart, a scarecrow in a field of leaning corn. 

And the woman thrust a short knife into Hayden’s throat. Blood spilled in the sheets on to the slush and still the woman sawed until Hayden was nearly headless and twitching, far beyond the reach of Wolf’s quick healing. 

But the villagers were not crying and shrinking from this murderer, from the ghastly corpse of a young girl that had been one of them, living, just a moment ago.

Their stark, terrified eyes were on Dr. Martin.

A dam broke in Lydia, tears surging down her cheeks, she took a ragged step forward and cried, “Do not look at me!” she heaved a sob and then, “Is a crime not a crime just because it is done in daylight?! In front of your eyes?! Do not look at me!” She jabbed her finger at death’s new vessel where she was still crouched, blade dripping into the snow, “She has killed your own daughter! And you look at me?! You are beasts! Fearful beasts! Do not give her this power! Resist!”

Those circled around her split, eyes darting mistrustfully from neighbor to neighbor. If any heeded her warning there were not as many as she could have hoped. None moved to stop the woman, not even the constable. This was the chaos they blamed on Fox and on the Wood. A fight broke out to her left. Screams and wails pitched up into the frostbitten air. And they could not see what was so horribly apparent to Lydia: that the Spirits in the Wood were silent, that this chaos was all their own making; theirs and the silently lurking oligarchs that had produced this woman who killed children indiscriminately.

By the look in her eyes, she was not even totally aware of what she’d done. She looked far into Lydia and through her to the other side because Lydia Martin was not alive to her, she was a trophy waiting to be mounted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lydiaa
> 
> thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed


	26. Chapter 26

Christian looked on disdainfully as Stiles ordered and proceeded then to shovel forkfuls of a second slice of chocolate cake into his mouth. In his other hand was a large dust coated tome he’d dug out of the back of some derelict consignment shop and it was all of it too much for Christian’s fine sensibilities. If he was a snob, this was a prime example as to why.

“You are aware of the existence of other people?” he asked idly, lip curling in disgust as he flicked ash from his cigarette into a crystal tray.

“Not any more than they are of mine,” Stiles answered, though his focus was still elsewhere, “When the moon is furthest from the earth, does that make Wolf Children weaker do you think? This author spends all his time talking about when to hide your children and the evils of ever staring directly at the moon longer than five heartbeats.”  

“This is an expensive restaurant,” Christian sighed, “you can tell because all of the food is so small.” He picked delicately at the precise arrangement of his mushrooms on toast, drizzled in celery sauce. There was unequivocally something deeply erotic about well-executed plating.

“You asked me to come here,” Stiles, irritatingly, pointed out.

“I have no else to eat a polite meal with.” He’d have put more drama in his words if he had had the energy. He settled instead for a gulp of wine. A dramatic gulp.

“There’s a joke here somewhere,” came the slurry voice of the man Christian had come here to meet. This man was rarely on time and quite a lot of person to absorb all on one’s own, though Stiles had already proven little interest in leaving their hotel room at all, let alone making polite conversation with a boisterous stranger. "Two psychics walk into a bar – or,” the man massaged his round chin, “damn, one psychic cries wolf while the other fu-,”

“Bobby, this is Stiles, my slave,” Christian cut in with a flourish on his arm.

Stiles raised a brow at Christian, finally tearing his gaze from the pages and then took in Robert Finstock’s erratic hair and dress. The flinch that followed was not well hidden.                           

“Who taught you reading, slave?” Bobby asked, taking a seat at their table.

Stiles answered him with a tired glare. He’d not been sleeping well if the shuffled steps pacing the common room of their suite at all hours of the night were any indication.

“Find anything?” asked Christian. He hadn’t much hope in their endeavor and it was clear in his voice. Whatever Finstock had been able to suss out for them it would be the final rock to turn over in Good River seeing as every other inquiry they had made had gotten them no farther. He was an excellent person to know in the city, there was not much that escaped Bobby’s manic gaze, and if he knew nothing about this – Peter liked to refer to them as silver pig-fuckers – cult it would be time to move on and try once again to predict the next move across the board.

Christian should have had an advantage over their quarry, especially because of Stiles. With Stiles chanting beside him over his scrying bowl, Stiles who was a maple tap to the Wood’s power, who could channel energy as surely as a steel rod in a storm, they should have been able to divine even a single grain of sand lost on a shore of trillions. For a fortnight they attempted it again and again, and their efforts had ended in Christian hurling a candlestick at the mantle.

Christian did not _fail_ when casting. He never failed. Peter had snickered each time the cantrip fizzled; he hadn't a high opinion of spellwork. He had never relied on anything other than his will to accomplish what he wished; Peter could solve any problem with calculated brute force. Accept for this one. His evenings spent stalking in the city, hunting for scent trails were just as useless. They settled for more basic means of searching while Christian dealt with his flaccid magics and there was nothing for Peter to tear apart with his fangs.

“Now that’s an interesting question,” Bobby said grandly, sweeping both arms behind his head as he thought on the matter. It was never easy to tell how much of Finstock was deliberate theatricality and how much was genuine. He could very well have been a genius cursed with funny hair and wild eyes. “I’ve heard that there’s a girl child, not much older than your learned slave, but there’s not a tutor nor governess in the colligate circles to have taught her. She did not debut when she came of age, at least, not publicly. I couldn’t even find her first name. The only reason I was able to find out about her existence is that she was apparently delivered in a dairy farmer’s house two provinces away quite accidentally when her mother went into labor while traveling.”

“He has a child we can find no information about, that was born sometime, some place in the country,” Christian said dryly, “Stiles, he’s saved us.” Stiles’s mouth tightened into the approximation of a wry smile.

“Grandchild, you smug turd,” Finstock snapped, shoving a fist-sized helping of bread from their table into his cheek. “The girl is his grandchild. He has two children, both adults, both nameless, faceless, wraiths prowling the night. That’s all I could find of what you asked, however, there is a certain buxom trifle that works a kiln in the foundry off Colt’s Neck Road. She indulges me in an occasional congress of sorts....” he trailed off, his eyes going vacant for a few uncomfortable seconds before he blinked rapidly and continued, “she has a friend that was commissioned to produce odd ceramic parts, well, they think the parts were meant for a machine of some kind but she was only given specifications and nothing more.

“Ordinarily I should think your man and his peers bare no identifying marks, but this friend of my friend was paid in solid silver coins emblazoned with a _fleur de lis_.”

Nearly climbing across the table in his excitement Stiles demanded, “Where were the parts delivered?”

“They were picked up at the foundry,” Finstock said with a shrug, “The courier was said to have arrived on the specified day driving a team of four oxen.”

“ _Where did he go?_ "

“To a warehouse in Redd’s Peak.”

Stiles was already moving, scrabbling to gather his things and then storming toward the polished brass transom.

“I wonder how far he’ll get before realizing that he doesn’t know where to go,” speculated Christian. Finstock handed him a paper scrap scribbled with in his frantic handwriting.

“What’s the veal here like, I could use some veal,” Bobby said, stretching out in his chair, “Something powerful about devouring an animal with such big, soulful eyes.”

“Sometimes I think that being swept away by a sardonic werewolf was not the best decision of my life.”

Nodding solemnly, Bobby said, “I feel the same way about the piercing on my penis.” And Christian patted the back of his hand.

 

The warehouse, of course, was long emptied and had been since rented out to a distribution company that had filled nearly all available floor space with stock. Christian did not ask what was inside the crates, though a few of them looked to be leaking something yellowish. He scraped the bottom of his brogues on the nearest surface – which turned out to be yet another container also excreting ooze - while holding Stiles’s shoulder for balance.  

“I received another letter from your father, you know,” Christian said drably. His shoes looked to be mostly unharmed, though he’d have to pay a ransom to have them cleaned.

“They paid her off, how else could she remember nothing about them? She wouldn’t even give me their alias.”  He was still staring off the way the landlord had gone after leaving them, as if her shadow might scurry back without her.

“I know you can hear me.”

“They were probably gone before we got to town," he hissed, fingers going through her hair, “The visions aren’t giving us enough.”

With a sigh Christian righted himself, “Fine, but we will talk about this later. While your father is certainly my type it cannot possibly be my responsibility to keep tabs on both you and he.”

Stiles hummed his response and went off down one of the aisles to poke around for only God knew what else. Life had been easier on his parent’s pig farm, boring and shit-stinking but at least the pigs handled their problems through the usual means of eating too much, trying to kill each other or wallowing in mud. Christian really hadn’t the interest to peel the layers off of Stilinski’s particular onion of angst.

 

As they made ready to leave, Stiles still looking dour, they were approached by a seedy looking laborer a block down from the warehouse. Or rather, he was a seedy werewolf if Christian’s senses were not too muddled by the wine he’d polished off at lunch.

“They’re war machines,” the wolf said, eyes continually going up the street.

“Excuse me?” Christian sighed.

“You wanted to know what’s being shipped outta Milton’s?” he said low and quick, “It’s parts of war machines, siege towers, cannons, that kind of thing.”

“Who are you?” Stiles demanded.

“It doesn’t matter,” growled the wolf, “but I worked for a private militia on the coast and I know what I saw. Those people – they decimated Gibbard’s Paw and that shit they’ve been commissioning around the city, it’s enough weaponry to occupy a whole province.”

“And you’re telling us this because?” Christian drawled.

“We’ve been watching them,” he whispered, “looking for weaknesses, but our spies keep disappearing. This isn’t about territory anymore it’s about surviving.” He said no more and slipped away from them, disappearing into the hordes of people packing the district. Things were getting a smidge too interesting for Christian’s taste. Werewolves stopping strange witches on the street? And to share information? What on earth was the world coming to?

Christian struck a match off his shoe – why not? - and lit a cigarette because this was the best he could do in situations such as these.

Stiles swallowed, “Do you have the letter from my father?”

“Not on me-,”

And Stiles was sprinting down the road at full tilt before Christian could push out another word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> finstock knows everybody's dirt


	27. Chapter 27

There was a figure in the oral lore of shifters that would arise when the forest came under threat. Peter told him of this figure, as per their arrangement, one evening after dinner. The Witness, they were sometimes called, was imbued with the all-sight of the Wood and was so valuable to the woodland that they were hidden among children of the Clans.

It became tradition then, in the dark ages following the crumble of society, that families of wolves would assign their own "witness” to act as emissary on their behalf and to conceal the identity of the true Witness. In this way, the Watcher in the Woods could vanish and become a single drop in an ocean full of them.            

The mysterious and elusive Dr. Deaton currently served as the Hale Family emissary.

“It’s something you must be born into,” Peter had said, swirling the red wine in his glass, “shifter or human, you must be born with a sort of spark that allows for the channeling of energy in order to serve as an emissary and assume the role of false witness.”

“It has to be convincing,” Christian had piped up from across the room.

Nodding, he’d agreed, “You must have at least a small drop of clairvoyance or magical predilection.”

This was what had drawn Thalia Hale to him. None of them really knew the extent of his ability, only that they could smell the thunder on his skin and that whatever he was capable of, it was far and away more powerful than anything Dr. Deaton could conjure up.

However, when asked, neither man could say exactly what the Witness needed protecting from.

 

Stiles burst into their suite and started tearing apart Christian’s things on the writing desk. When he finally came upon the envelope he ripped in apart, but he was too overwhelmed, too terrified and exhausted to read it. He skimmed the lines, the skin of his brain strangled tightly around itself. His father’s words were vague, incomprehensible, he asked about things that had never happened, spoke about people Stiles had never met. It was too late. He had been chasing ghosts for weeks, going from city to city and it was too late.

Stiles sagged against the desk. He’d done this, he’d allowed it to happen. The Wood had given them everything it could; he’d sat through seances, scoured libraries for more information, more, more, more. That man – that _beast –_ had emerged from hiding while Stiles hunted him in every conceivable place. If he’d been hiding at all; what a fool Stiles was. These silver-blooded monsters were not so different from people like the Hales. They had been there all along; a black mass held in plain sight.

“I’ve gotten a disturbing letter from my sister,” said Peter Hale, leaned on the door frame across the room, “It reads as nonsense. She says that mother and father are doing well.” Stiles couldn’t even turn to face him. He sunk lower, sagged into the desk chair. “Our parents have been dead fifteen years. Though I will say, of all the monsters I have encountered in my lifetime, they were the most horrific.”

“They’re in Last Rest,” Stiles heard himself croak.

“I’ve packed most of our things. If they are watching the post, they undoubtedly know where to find us.”

“We have to go over the Wall,” Stiles said stoutly, pushing to his feet.

For the first time perhaps, Peter had no response to this, no witty retort. He stared hard at the floorboards, arms loosely woven together. And then, “You have a visitor in the salon; make it quick.”

He departed and Stiles followed. He shouldered through the double doors and found Derek Hale standing by the mantle dressed all in his customary dark colors. A frisson went down Stiles’s spine. He stopped dead in his tracks leaving the door to gently snick closed behind him. Derek’s eyes were on his arms, on the ink marks that had just lost their scabs, marks like Christian’s meant to help him see all that he possibly could. They were an ugly tangle of thorns and animals and knots that wove down to his knuckles.

This was the cruelest punishment the Wood could administer. He’d failed to find anything even remotely capable of stopping the terrible vision of Derek’s death and now the old man was everywhere, laying down one card and then another and Derek was here, after months without a single word, he was here on the eve of their failure.

He looked tragically thin, his clothes no longer hugged pleasingly to his frame but rather off it as they would a straw man. His eyes were bruised from denying his body any rest and his hair and beard were a long, unkempt mess. Chin trembling Stiles threw a hand out at him and snapped, “Don’t you understand what’s happening? How – how could you –,” _how could you wither like this?_ But he couldn’t bring up the rest of it, not with Derek’s eyes on his. He had been wild and virile when Stiles left and now, he was dog with a cruel master, starved and miserable.

He said, his voice scratchy, “Forgive me.”

Stiles stared at him, his eyes stinging, “Forgive you what? You didn’t know me, you didn’t, you didn’t owe me anything.”

“I lied to you."

“Peter lies five times before breakfast.”

Stumped, his brow pinched, Derek tried, “I thought - you hated me.”

“Well I don’t!” Stiles wasn’t sure why he was shouting. “I left because I was angry! And – and I stayed away because I’m, I hate myself for going!”

Derek’s throat bobbed and he licked the seam of his mouth before forcing out, “I should have followed you the moment you left.”

Christian liked to lay down his tarot in the evening and talk through his visions, though many of these ‘visions’ were spun up off the top of his mind and he meant them to entertain himself more than he meant to strain them for predictions. Stiles was represented in his spreads as The Fool.

“No, you shouldn’t have."

The Fool, who was often reversed, would appear in the tragic stories of their futures so trapped by his own desires and reckless because of them that the sky would come crumbling down around him before he could make a single decision. The Fool could only react as things got worse, react without thought; he survived, but he did not live.

Derek couldn’t have arrived here any sooner or later than he did. This was how it must always have happened. It took nearly all of winter for Stiles to realize that most basic of principles: that there was no story about himself that mattered more than his own. But it was late by the time he could shake off his anger and see it for what it was. Thalia and Derek had been able to hurt him only because he loved them so much. The sun was sinking on his time with them and _he_ had been responsible for so much of its waste. He had stayed away, locked himself up to scour old texts, let an inker needle his skin and make the moles his mother gave him disappear; he had made the choice to leave and he committed to that choice so that once the threat of death no longer hung over them all he would have something to return to.

So that he might find a place to rest at long last.                                              

He offered his hand, “It’s - it’s not safe here. We have to go.” Derek stared liked the dead. He had come here to be rejected. His daunted expression was as much as Stiles deserved, “We have to go.”

Derek crossed the room. When he was close enough Stiles could smell the city on him. He for a long while stood in front of Stiles with his gaze low and searching under his lids. His knuckle grazed the raised skin of Stiles’s forearm and the tattoo of a swooping horned owl with vervain blooms for eyes. In the first few weeks of their parting, when Stiles was convinced he would never let himself be so affected by his feelings again, he had fought in the early hours of the morning to forget what standing so close to Derek Hale felt like.

Not even the Wood could peel him down to his bones. His hide may be cut up and his mind might still be undoing the knots left behind by those he had known, but the very core of his being had been preserved for Derek Hale and no one else. It would always be that way, even should they grow to despise each other in old age or they be separated by family, by war, by death; the middle of his soul had never belonged entirely to himself.

Derek took his hand then and he looked as though there was something he wished to say but words had never done him much service. His fingers ghosted over the curve of Stiles’s chin as if touching him with any more pressure than that of a breath would make Stiles disperse like smoke climbing off a wick.

Their fingers laced together, they set out in to the hall, Derek close to his side and Fox bounding ahead of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> short one this week. LR jumps around a lot more than i realized before seeing the fucking stupid long chapter index scrolly thing. like its comparable to Stay in length but... damn. 
> 
> writing love sequences is greatly simplified by getting to walk into the other room and see Darling crushing ass at tetris 99. he actually won a game somehow. i'm proud so you have to hear about it. if i could easily post pictures on here you'd also be seeing just a fuckton of my cat. 
> 
> hope you enjoyed! thank you for reading! comment/subscribe/kudos/go drink some tea/it's a healthy thing to put in your body. <3


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